V E R N I A N A

Jules Verne Studies – Etudes Jules Verne Vol. 1

2008-2009 Initial capital “V” copyright ©1972 Richard Aeschlimann, Yverdon- les-Bains (Switzerland). Reproduced with his permission.

La lettrine “V” de couverture est copyright ©1972 Richard Aeschlimann, Yverdon-les-Bains (Suisse). Elle est reproduite ici avec son autorisation. V E R N I A N A

Jules Verne Studies – Etudes Jules Verne

Vol. 1

2008-2009

Editorial Board – Comité de rédaction

William Butcher Daniel Compère Volker Dehs Arthur B. Evans Terry Harpold Jean-Michel Margot Walter James Miller Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd

ISSN : 1565-8872

V E R N I A N A

Jules Verne Studies – Etudes Jules Verne

Vol. 1 - 2008-2009

Editorial

The Editors ― “Dr. Zvi Har’El (December 14, 1949-February 2, 2008) and International Jules Verne Studies - A Tribute” i

Le Comité de redaction ― “Dr. Zvi Har’El (14 décembre 1949-2 février 2008) et les Etudes internationales Jules Verne - Un Hommage” iii

Daniel Compère ― “Editorial (Français)” v

Daniel Compère ― “Editorial (English)” vii

Articles

Walter James Miller ― “As Verne Smiles” 1

Arthur B. Evans ― “Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies” 9

Brian Taves ― “Expedition Into a Novel” 23

Terry Harpold ― “Verne’s Errant Readers: Nemo, Clawbonny, Michel Dufrénoy” 31

Ian Thompson & Philippe Valetoux – “Jules Verne’s visits to Gibraltar in 1878 and 1884” 43

Brian Taves - “Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation” 51 Reviews

Dave Bonte ― “Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1882) en néerlandais” 65

Upcoming Conferences and Symposia Conférences et Symposia à venir

The 2009 Eaton Science Fiction Conference - Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne 67 and Beyond - April 30-May 3, 2009 - University of California, Riverside

Index of Authors and Editorial Board Members - Index des auteurs et membres 69 du Comité de rédaction

ISSN : 1565-8872 Dr. Zvi Har’El (December 14, 1949 – February 2, 2008) and International Jules Verne Studies - A Tribute

Most contemporary scholars of Jules Verne would agree that the history of international Verne studies can be divided into two distinct periods: pre-Zvi and post-Zvi. In the pre-Zvi era, each of us worked in near-isolation from one another, and we rarely shared the fruits of our individual labors. There existed little communication among us and little sense of community. Outlets for publishing research on Verne remained limited to books and journals that were often hard to find and difficult to purchase. And those rare digital resources devoted to Verne, scattered here and there across the World Wide Web, seemed most often to be superficial, myth-based, and teeming with error.

Picture taken by Zvi's daughter, Michal, Dec. 7, 2007

i ii Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Then, on November 13, 1995, Dr. Zvi Har’El—professor of mathematics at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology—launched his website called “Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection.” With its high level of quality and comprehensiveness, it immediately attracted the attention (and participation) of serious Verne aficionados from around the world. Offering invaluable tools such as “The Complete Jules Verne Bibliography,” the “Jules Verne Virtual Library,” and “Academic Scholarship on Jules Verne” (in some ways the precursor of Verniana), Zvi’s website soon became the leading source of information on Jules Verne on the Web. But what really revolutionized the field of Verne studies was his creation of the “Jules Verne Forum,” an international discussion board free for all to join. The Forum, which started with nine members in January 1996, became an online lieu de réunion for all Vernians, a meeting place where we came to share our research, to engage in wide-ranging (and multilingual) discussions, and to showcase up-to-date information about this important author and his legacy. Through his website and Jules Verne Forum, Zvi succeeded in transcending national and cultural boundaries, making Verne studies more international in scope. In many ways, he brought people together. Jean-Michel Margot said, during the opening session of the “Jules Verne Mondial” in 2005, that this truly international event was realized thanks to one man: Zvi Har’El. Zvi wanted Vernian scholarship to become a more collective enterprise, less proprietary and/or exclusive in nature and more openly accessible to all. It was in this spirit that he created a new international online journal devoted to Verne, which he called Verniana. Following Zvi’s sudden and tragic death a year ago, we are proud to offer the first issue of his Verniana. We dedicate it to his pioneering vision and his magnanimous heart. We will remember Zvi as a good-humored, jovial man, dedicated and indefatigable, always ready to help others. He was a dear friend, and we will miss him. Zvi wanted the first issue of Verniana to appear on Jules Verne’s birthday, February 8. This date will henceforth also commemorate the birth of a new era in international Verne scholarship and our brother in spirit who brought Verne studies into the electronic age.

THE EDITORS Dr. Zvi Har’El (14 décembre 1949 – 2 février 2008) et les Etudes internationales Jules Verne – Un Hommage

La plupart des spécialistes actuels de Jules Verne sont sans doute d’accord pour séparer l’histoire contemporaine des études verniennes en deux périodes distinctes: avant Zvi et après Zvi. Avant Zvi, chacun de nous travaillait isolément, sans grande communication avec les autres chercheurs, et nous partagions rarement les résultats de nos travaux individuels. Le sentiment de communauté vernienne n’existait pas et les échanges entre spécialistes étaient peu nombreux. Les possibilités de publier nos recherches se limitaient aux livres et aux périodiques souvent difficiles à trouver et à acheter. Et les rares ressources numériques dédiées à Verne, éparpillées ici et là à travers la Toile, semblaient le plus souvent superficielles, basées sur des légendes et entachées d’erreurs.

Photographie prise par la fille de Zvi, Michal, le 7 décembre 2007

iii iv Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Et alors, le 13 novembre 1995, le Docteur Zvi Har’El, professeur de mathématiques au Technion (Ecole Polytechnique d’Israël), ouvrait sur la Toile son site “La collection Jules Verne de Zvi Har’El”. Par sa qualité exceptionnelle et sa volonté de couvrir l’ensemble du monde de Jules Verne, son site attira immédiatement l’attention (et la participation) des passionnés sérieux de Jules Verne autour du monde. Offrant des ressources de haut niveau comme la “Bibliographie complète de Jules Verne”, la “Bibliothèque virtuelle Jules Verne”, et la “Recherche académique sur Jules Verne” (en un sens le précurseur de Verniana), le site de Zvi devint très rapidement la plus importante source d’informations en ligne sur Jules Verne. Mais ce qui a réellement révolutionné le domaine de la recherche vernienne fut la création du “Forum Jules Verne”, un lieu international de discussion, ouvert librement à tous. Le Forum démarra avec neuf membres en janvier 1996 et devint un lieu de réunion en ligne pour tous les verniens, une “agora” où nous venions partager nos recherches, engagés dans de larges discussions en plusieurs langues et échangeant des informations à jour sur l’auteur et son important héritage. Par son site et le Forum, Zvi a réussi à dépasser les limites nationales et culturelles, faisant de la recherche vernienne une entreprise internationale. De bien des manières, il trouvait toujours le moyen de réunir et d'unifier les individus. Jean-Michel Margot l’exprima lors de la séance d’ouverture du "Mondial Jules Verne" en 2005, en disant que cet événement international avait pu être réalisé grâce à une seule personne, Zvi Har’El. Zvi souhaitait que la recherche vernienne devienne une entreprise plus collective, moins individuelle et/ou marquée par les soucis propriétaires, et aussi plus ouverte à tous. C’est dans cet esprit qu’il a créé un nouveau périodique en ligne consacré à Jules Verne, qu’il appela Verniana. Une année après le décès subit de Zvi, nous sommes fiers d’offrir le premier volume de son Verniana. Nous le dédions à son rêve de pionnier et à sa gentillesse magnanime. Nous nous souviendrons de Zvi comme d’un compagnon jovial, plein d’humour, passionné et infatigable, toujours prêt à aider les autres. C’était un ami très cher et il va nous manquer. Zvi souhaitait que Verniana voie le jour le 8 février, date de naissance de Jules Verne. Cette date célébrera donc aussi le début d’une ère nouvelle dans la recherche vernienne internationale et notre frère spirituel qui propulsa la recherche sur Jules Verne vers l’âge électronique.

LE COMITE DE REDACTION Éditorial

Daniel Compère

Pour présenter ce projet collectif, je partirai d’une expérience personnelle. A différentes époques, j’ai été amené à dresser un bilan des travaux sur Jules Verne. La première fois remonte à l’année 1973 à l’époque de la redécouverte de l’œuvre de Jules Verne, puis d’autres occasions se sont présentées à diverses reprises en 1976, en 2001, en 2005 et tout récemment en octobre 2007.[1] En ayant ainsi essayé de présenter plusieurs fois une synthèse de la recherche sur Jules Verne et en regardant l’évolution de ces bilans, je suis frappé par trois tendances de plus en plus marquées. D’abord, la diversité : les publications sur Jules Verne portent sur tous les sujets imaginables et donnent une véritable impression d’éparpillement. Pour un nouveau lecteur, selon l’ouvrage sur lequel il va tomber (c’est le mot !), il pourra croire que l’œuvre de Verne relève des technologies, de la médecine, de la psychiatrie, etc. Heureusement, il existe aussi de véritables recherches littéraires, publications de documents, etc. Ensuite, la confusion : il existe souvent dans ces publications une confusion entre le roman et la réalité (on va reprocher à l’auteur de se tromper sur un fait alors qu’il se situe dans le champ de l’imaginaire) et une confusion entre l’œuvre et son auteur. Je le dis encore une fois : l’écrivain Jules Verne qui prend son porte-plume et qui s’assied à son bureau devant une feuille de papier ne se confond pas avec le narrateur qui, à l’intérieur d’un roman, raconte l’histoire et qui appartient, lui, au domaine de la fiction. J’ajoute aussi un phénomène qui prend de l’ampleur : la grande confusion entre les différentes versions des textes (sans aborder la question des manuscrits et des romans posthumes) : bien souvent, il n’est pas précisé de quel texte il est question. Or, nous savons qu’il existe des versions multiples pour un certain nombre de romans de Jules Verne. Par exemple, si l’on étudie ou si l’on écrit la préface d’une réédition de Voyage au centre de la Terre, parle-t-on de la première édition de 1864 ou de la deuxième de 1867 dans laquelle plusieurs chapitres ont été ajoutés ? Enfin l’ignorance : en dépit des bibliographies, des lieux de documentation, des publications diverses, je constate dans un certain nombre de publications une ignorance des travaux antérieurs, sans parler de ceux qui publient un article sur un sujet qu’ils croient découvrir alors que le même sujet a déjà été traité quelques années auparavant. A cet égard, l’année 2005 avec son avalanche de publications est révélatrice de cette tendance fâcheuse que l’on pourrait assimiler à celle d’un voyageur qui s’avance sur un terrain sans cartes ni boussole. Mon souhait est que Verniana soit le lieu de résistance à ces tendances en proposant des études sur Jules Verne qui permettent de revenir à des travaux sérieux, fondés sur une véritable méthodologie et une base solide. Le fonctionnement de la revue en offre les garanties avec un comité de rédaction composé de spécialistes reconnus dans le monde verniste. Ces spécialistes sont chargés d’examiner les articles soumis à publication et de signaler à l’auteur, s’il le faut, des points sur lesquels son article peut être amélioré. Et cela en toute confraternité.

v vi Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Je suis persuadé que ce projet – ambitieux, certes – fera à terme disparaître les petits défauts de la recherche verniste que je signalais ci-dessus. La diversité des études ne sera plus un éparpillement, mais un enrichissement par la multiplication des points de vue. Les confusions disparaîtront, car chacun des auteurs s’appliquera à préciser les bases sur lesquelles il s’appuie. L’ignorance reculera devant une mosaïque d’études qui fera véritablement avancer notre connaissance de l’œuvre de Jules Verne si riche, si complexe et si passionnante. Verniana est une revue véritablement internationale qui publiera des articles en plusieurs langues, l’anglais et le français au départ, d’autres langues peut-être. Les articles ne seront pas traduits mais accompagnés d’un résumé dans chaque langue. Précisons que, à la différence de certaines revues, Verniana n’aura pas de date de sortie précise. Chaque article sera isolément publié dans le format de la revue. Et tous les articles ainsi mis en ligne pendant un an formeront un volume. Le numéro 1 de Verniana va se constituer à partir des contributions apportées au cours de l’année 2008. Enfin, mais faut-il le préciser, Verniana est une revue du XXIe siècle, accessible librement sur l’Internet par tout utilisateur. Une revue digne de Jules Verne, enfin ! J’ajouterai une dernière note à cet éditorial, une touche de tristesse au moment où Verniana est lancé. Celui qui en fut le concepteur et le premier artisan, Zvi Har’El est disparu quelques jours avant de lancer officiellement la revue. Il voulait qu’elle paraisse pour le 180e anniversaire de la naissance de Jules Verne, le 8 février 2008. L’équipe qui s’est constituée autour de lui a désormais la responsabilité de faire exister cette revue, non seulement pour réaliser ce beau projet, mais aussi pour rendre hommage au collègue qui en a lancé l’idée.

Daniel Compère Amiens, 3 février 2008

NOTES

1. J’en précise les références : “La Vernologie” dans Les Cahiers du CURSA (Université d’Amiens), no 1, mars 1974 ; Le Développement des études sur Jules Verne, écrit avec François Raymond (Paris : Lettres modernes, coll. “Archives”, 1976) ; “Il reste encore beaucoup à faire...” dans la Revue Jules Verne, no 12, 2e semestre 2001 ; “Jules Verne : bilan d’un anniversaire” dans Romantisme, no 131, 1er trim. 2006 ; “Jules Verne : bilan et perspective”, conférence donnée le 26 octobre 2007 dans la Maison Jules Verne à Amiens dans le cadre du cycle de rencontres organisé par l’Université de Picardie. Editorial

Daniel Compère

By way of introduction to this collective project, I will begin with a personal observation. At different times in the past, I have felt induced to assess the state of scholarly work on Jules Verne. The first time was back in 1973, during the period of the rediscovery of Verne’s œuvre, then on other occasions under different circumstances in 1976, 2001, 2005, and most recently in October 2007.[1] Having thus produced several times a synthesis of the research on Verne, and reflecting on the evolution of these assessments, I am more and more struck by three tendencies. First, diversity: publications on Verne cover every subject imaginable, and give the impression that the field is scattered. For a new reader, and depending on the work that he may fall upon (fall – that’s the word!), he or she may well believe that Verne’s œuvre is concerned chiefly with technologies, medicine, psychiatry, etc. Fortunately, there are also genuinely literary investigations, collections of primary documents, etc. Next, confusion: in these publications there is often a confusion between the novel and reality (Verne is reproached for getting something factually wrong when the matter really bears on the field of imagination) and a confusion of the œuvre and its author. Let me say this one more time: the writer Jules Verne who picks up his pen and sits down at his desk before a sheet of paper cannot be mistaken for the narrator who within a novel tells the story and who belongs only therefore to the domain of fiction. To these confusions I add another of increasing importance: the great muddle of different versions of the texts. (I leave aside here the question of manuscripts and posthumous novels.) Too often, no indication is given as to which version of the text is in question, even though we know that there are multiple versions of some of the novels. For example, if one writes the preface to a re-edition of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, is it the first edition of 1864 or the second edition of 1867, to which several chapters were added? Finally, ignorance: despite the bibliographies, documentary sources, and diverse publications, I observe in a certain number of studies an ignorance of earlier work – i.e., those who publish an article on a subject that they believe to have discovered when it had already been dealt with years before. In this respect 2005, with its avalanche of publications, reveals a deplorable tendency that one might compare to that of a traveler advancing on a terrain with neither maps nor compass… My wish is that Verniana may become the counter-measure to these tendencies by offering studies of Verne that will allow us to return to serious efforts based on a sound methodology and critical awareness. The method of the journal offers a guarantee of this in its Editorial Board composed of well-known Verne specialists. They are charged with the responsibility of examining articles submitted for publication and alerting the author, if need be – and in complete camaraderie – to points on which the article that might be improved.

vii viii Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

I am persuaded that this project – certainly an ambitious one – will in time bring an end to the deficiencies of Verne research mentioned above. The diversity of studies will no longer lead to a scattering effect, but to an enriching of the field by the multiplication of points of view. The confusions will disappear because each of the authors will be required to stipulate the evidence on which his or her work stands. Ignorance will disappear from a mosaic of studies that plainly advances our understanding of Verne’s rich, complex, and compelling œuvre. Verniana is a truly international journal. Articles will be published in multiple languages, English and French at first, perhaps others later on. Articles will not be translated but will be accompanied by abstracts in each language of the journal. Note also that, unlike some journals, Verniana has no predetermined dates of publication. Instead, each article will be published individually in the journal’s format and all articles posted online in a year will form a single volume. Volume 1 of Verniana will comprise contributions to the journal throughout 2008. Moreover – and this must be emphasized – Verniana is a journal of the 21st century, freely accessible to every Internet user. In a word, a journal worthy of Jules Verne! I will add one final remark, a note of sadness at the moment when Verniana is released. Zvi Har’El, who conceived of the journal and was its first architect, passed away a few days before its scheduled release date. It was his wish that the journal should appear on 8 February 2008, the 180th anniversary of the birth of Jules Verne. The editorial team that formed around him has since taken on the responsibility of bringing the journal into being not only to realize this fine project but also as a tribute to the colleague who first launched the idea. Daniel Compère Amiens, 3 February 2008 (Translated by Terry Harpold)

NOTES

1. Here are the references: “La Vernologie” in Les Cahiers du CURSA (University of Amiens), no1, March 1974; Le Développement des études sur Jules Verne, written with François Raymond (Paris: Lettres modernes, coll. “Archives”, 1976); “Il reste encore beaucoup à faire...” in Revue Jules Verne, no12, 2nd sem. 2001; “Jules Verne : bilan d’un anniversaire” in Romantisme, no131, 1st trim. 2006; “Jules Verne : bilan et perspective,” a lecture given 26 October 2007 at the Maison Jules Verne (Amiens) in a series of meetings organized by the University of Picardie. As Verne Smiles

Walter James Miller

ABSTRACT

In this piece, Walter James Miller describes the “resurrection” of Jules Verne among English-speaking countries and interviews five Vernian scholars about the current state of Verne’s reputation. He begins with the fact that, in an effort to profit from Verne’s international fame in the 19th century, British and American publishers rushed into print very poorly translated and edited versions of his works. As a result, by the 1930s, Verne had developed a reputation as an author only of “children’s books,” which persisted for many decades. This situation began to change in 1963 when Miller was asked to write the introduction to a new edition of an 1872 version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This version was riddled with errors that had stripped the work of its humor, philosophy, and science. The first printing sold out quickly and began to inspire a new generation of Verne scholars. In 1976, the first volume of The Annotated Jules Verne was published, containing a new and annotated translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A second volume followed 2 years later, performing the same service for From Earth to the Moon. In all, more than 30 new translations have been published since 1965, and 9 new titles have been published in English. Perhaps most validating is the news that French publishers are now preparing their first critical editions of Vernian works, which will be modeled after the American annotated versions. Truly, an international victory for those seeking Verne’s rehabilitation.

RĖSUMĖ

Dans cet article, Walter James Miller décrit la “résurrection” de Jules Verne dans les pays anglo-saxons et questionne cinq spécialistes à propos de la réputation actuelle de Verne. Il débute en mentionnant le fait que les éditeurs anglais et américains du dix-neuvième siècle, avec l’idée de profiter de la réputation internationale de Verne, se dépêchaient de publier des versions très mal traduites et pauvrement présentées de ses œuvres. Le résultat fut que, vers 1930, Verne s’est vu considéré comme auteur pour enfants uniquement, réputation qui s’est maintenue pendant plusieurs décades. La situation a commencé à évoluer en 1963, quand Miller fut invité à rédiger l’introduction d’une nouvelle édition de la version de 1872 de Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers. Cette version était bourrée d’erreurs qui éliminaient tout humour, philosophie et science du roman. Le premier tirage fut vendu très rapidement et commença à inspirer une nouvelle génération de spécialistes de Jules Verne. En 1976, le premier volume de The Annotated Jules Verne fut publié, contenant une nouvelle traduction de Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers, avec de nombreux commentaires. Le deuxième volume suivit deux ans plus tard, remplissant les mêmes fonctions pour De la Terre à la Lune. Au total, plus d’une trentaine de nouvelles traductions ont été publiées depuis 1965, dont neuf œuvres jamais traduites auparavant en anglais. Le plus encourageant est la nouvelle que les français prévoient une édition critique des œuvres de Jules Verne, prenant les versions commentées américaines pour modèle. Véritablement une victoire internationale pour ceux qui envisagent une réhabilitation littéraire de Jules Verne.

1 2 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

In 1976, when Thomas Y. Crowell published the first Annotated Jules Verne, the jacket was graced with blurbs by such luminaries as Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut. Asimov pictured Verne as “surely….smiling from his grave,” because “for the first time [Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea] appears in English as it was in French, together with fascinating notes that place it in the context of its time.” And Vonnegut imagined that “Few science-fiction stories could match [the editor’s] adventures in resurrecting a great author, Jules Verne, in love and scholarship.” So now, on February 8, 2008, we can imagine how much bigger, wider, fuller that smile! For, on this 180th anniversary of his birth, of his arrival in history, a group of some of the world’s top Verne scholars hereby launchVerniana. This is the first international, multi-language review devoted to the Grand Romancer. And we suspect that the smile includes Verne’s joy that—a la Jules—this new journal appears in a new medium, online. And 2008 is the 12th anniversary of Zvi Har’El’s founding of the Jules Verne Forum (http://JV.Gilead.org.il), the 15th of Arthur Edwards’ founding of The North American Jules Verne Society, and the 43rd of the start of the massive “rescue operation” that has, since 1965, involved more than 40 scholars. But why was a “rescue” required? What does Vonnegut mean by a “resurrection?” Wasn’t Verne world-famous from the 1860s on? Yes, in France, Germany, Russia, China, etc., but by the 1930s his reputation in the English-speaking world had sunk to a pitiful low. In an effort to profit from Verne’s international fame, English and American publishers had, in the 1870s and thereafter, rushed into print slapdash, tendentiously cut, error-soaked translations. These versions were so shallow that they came to be regarded as fit only for children. And so this 180th anniversary is also the perfect time to review what has amounted to an amazing reversal in literary history. Verniana is not only the latest step in this phenomenon, it is the best medium for recording it. According to Brian Taves, Library of Congress expert on Verne, many 20th-century parents were disturbed by this criminal situation. For instance, Willis T. Bradley, a Massachusetts academic, lamented “the free and silly adaptations made for….schoolboys nearly a hundred years ago.” For his own kids, he composed several new translations, most notably Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was published in hardcover (New York: A. A. Wynn, 1956). And two years later I. O. Evans launched his Fitzroy edition, which ironically added to the controversy. On the one hand, Evans issued many titles Anglophone readers had never heard of. On the other, in an effort to make his translations more salable, he “decided to leave out the detail, for surely no author more repaid judicious skipping”! He slashed the longer volumes (e.g. Twenty Thousand Leagues) 25% or more. Worse yet, he imposed his own political and religious attitudes on what “Verne” had said, actually regarding his own editing as “Providential inspiration.” So in effect he was repeating the license that the 19th-century translators had arrogated to themselves. Just as the Fitzroy series was “beginning to wind down,” says Taves, “Walter James Miller became the first translator to explore the problem of Verne in English in an essay introducing his own first translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965).” As Taves himself reminds us, at the start of Master of the World, John Strock explains, “If I speak of myself in this story, it is because I have been deeply involved in its startling events.” So please let WJM take over this story in his own voice. My main question is: How much progress have we made in rehabilitating Verne in America? As Verne Smiles 3

In 1963, I agreed to write for Washington Square Press an introduction to a new school edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Although the title page gave no date or credit to any translator, I managed to find out that this version was published in 1872, it was by Mercier Lewis, and that that was one of the pseudonyms used by the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier, of Oxford. Checking with other publishers—for I soon discovered that they almost all used the Mercier Lewis version—I found that only one would even answer me: “We have not heard from Mr. Lewis in some time,” the editor wrote me, “and can tell you nothing about him.” It would be four decades before I got the full story. Norman Wolcott, a fellow member in the North American Jules Verne Society, delivered a paper that was a brilliant piece of detective work. It explains why the clergyman was reduced to doing rush hack translations, how he actually and helplessly made most of the hundreds of errors that are still enshrined in his editions. For me the nightmare began when in Lewis’s second chapter the narrator, Professor Aronnax, says, “I had just returned from a scientific research in the disagreeable territory of Nebraska.” I immediately imagined dozens of hands going up in Nebraska classrooms, and in any wide-awake group. I knew I had to check the original French. Sure enough, all that Aronnax had said in the original French was that he had just returned from the…BADLANDS…badlands…those geological phenomena of erosional sculpting and fantastically shaped hills. Now here the reader had lost a typical Verne allusion to a wonder of geography, and gained a nasty unintended and mysterious slur on Nebraska. From there on I proceeded with painful caution, like a poor GI in Iraq watching for bumps in the roadside. Mercier’s road blew up all over the place where Verne had sketched entirely different terrains. And I was compiling a list of scientific details that the clergyman had simply omitted, e.g, the essential facts about Nemo’s batteries. And a few pages later the Captain was saying that his steel plates have a “density of .7 to .8 that of water.” I could see any bright school kid raising her hand and protesting, “Why, that would mean Nemo’s steel would float.” Pity the teacher teaching that classic! What the poor teacher could not know was that the good clergyman had botched dozens of crucial passages and, as Wolcott has now taught us to say, it was his publisher who omitted scores of others. These “errors” of commission and omission ranged from neat little Verne jokes, which deprived the reader of the vaudeville side of Verne, to long passages that took all the politics and philosophy out of a writer for whom there is no separation between science and politics. For example, the reverend’s version omits Verne’s first mention of Nemo’s portrait gallery of heroes —like Washington, Lincoln, Kosciusko—and of Nemo’s own politically tortured family. This explains so much about Captain Nobody. Neither student, teacher, nor other adult readers learn how Verne felt about the colonialist British exploitation of the Indian pearl divers, or even the Professor’s interpretations of Darwin. Naturally I could not resist the temptation to see if such indignities had been visited on just Twenty Thousand Leagues. Or had they generally been applied to the great wave of English versions that came out in the 1870s and 1880s? I did not have to go far to discover the horrid truth. W. H. G. Kingston (1814-1880) was surely a man we could trust. He was a famous writer for children, covering adventures on all continents, famous largely for the strong patriotic and ethical message in his books. I discovered what that meant when I read his version of The Mysterious Island. Just one example: Kingston dared to rewrite Nemo’s deathbed speech so that it was no longer critical of British imperialism. 4 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Indeed, I soon found that a Philadelphia teacher had, as early as 1874, complained that an American version of Five Weeks in a Balloon “contains so many geographical mistakes that it must have been done in a hurry.” He wrote that “hasty translations of Verne’s later works by English hands,” with “some of the best passages omitted,” were being sold in America. The intrinsic value, the uniqueness of Verne’s work still managed to shine through. Our Broad Street Academy teacher went on to say that “these translations…spread like wildfire…and were everywhere hailed with the greatest delight by young and old.” There’s a tragicomic ending to this tale of the Philadelphia teacher, named Edward Roth. He himself got caught up in the frenzy. He put out a now infamous American version of the moon novels in which he has Verne write a poem about the City of Brotherly Love, talk in the first person, and invent many pro-American episodes that even the America-lover Verne could never have dared. A tragic precedent had been renewed: knowing no better, people would buy any incomplete and ersatz Verne book. Notice that the only Verne novel to escape such mistreatment was Around the World in Eighty Days. How come? By then Verne had become so famous that as each chapter was serialized in a leading French newspaper, foreign correspondents were cabling summaries back home! So when translators got to work on American book versions, they could certainly not wreak their usual irresponsible havoc and leave out less than was their wont. Knowing any better, I said, Americans would buy any version of Verne. But as time passed, American critics could not help concentrating on the literary value of Verne. Judging from the translations, they pronounced Verne a very poor writer. As Brian Aldiss summed it up in the early editions of his histories, Verne was considered an author fit only for boys. We hit bottom in American critical regard in 1961 when Galaxy magazine published a sneering article that—you guessed it!— ridiculed Verne for creating steel lighter than water, for failing to give the specs for his batteries, and on and on. Ironically, the writer, T. L . Thomas, like most critics, put the blame for these errors not on the translators but squarely on Verne himself! Even such an sf intellectual as Damon Knight had been taken in on this, and deeply regretted this error when Washington Square Press showed him a draft of my “Jules Verne in America: A Translator’s Preface.” My editor at Washington Square could easily have said, “Let’s just do what all the other publishers do. Put out Mercier Lewis.” The problem of course was that a long-dead translator does not have to be paid, and I was still very much alive. Phil Flayderman, my editor, actually sold this novel idea—-of paying a live Verne translator—-to his boss, Freeman Lewis, a cousin of Sinclair Lewis. Ethics won the day…another reason Verne must be smiling on February 8, 2008. While my version was in press, I discovered the beginning of another ironic trend in Verne publishing. Anthony Bonner had just put out a version of Twenty Thousand Leagues that was 99% complete in content but had serious new flaws. Whenever in doubt about what Verne meant, Bonner had simply fallen back on the Mercier Lewis version! For example, Nemo’s steel was still .7 to .8 the specific gravity of water! Worse yet—and this mistake surely delayed our mission for years—Bonner must certainly have noticed the awful omissions and errors in Mercier Lewis—since he used the clergyman as a backup— and told nobody about them! He did not mention this in his introduction because he did not write an introduction. And so he neither exposed the Lewis Mercier crimes nor claimed a BIG FIRST for himself! This is such a strange situation that it’s the perfect setup for a second crusade of detective work by Norman Wolcott. Alas, Bonner’s own incorporation of Mercier’s shenanigans did not remain corrected As Verne Smiles 5 until four decades later when Frederick Paul Walter helped Bantam put out an excellent new Bonner version. So now, there were at least two Mercier Lewis legacies to contend with. Some publishers still sell the Mercier Lewis intact, as we shall show in detail. Others correct his more obvious mistakes but “preserve” major omissions. And here’s the secret: they reissue Mercier Lewis in bright newly illustrated editions, perfect for Auntie’s expensive graduation gift to her nephews.

Of course, the most valuable—and endurable—value of my 1965 edition is that it DID contain an introduction, which Bonner’s should have done. I explained in detail why and how the Anglophone world had never had a chance to know the real Jules Verne. I offered my version of TTLUTS as a modest first step in the rehabilitation of Verne’s reputation in America. Washington Square Press had to rush out a second printing before publication because a small book club snatched up the first. In one month after publication, I appeared on 27 radio and TV shows to explain why “There are two Jules Vernes.” Another irony in this story is that the Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books series bought the rights to produce a condensed version! I had done a new version partly to close the gaps in America’s knowledge of the real Jules Verne, and our ever-alert-to-new-trends Reader’s Digest issued a condensed version, with new gaps of their own choosing. But at least, or so it seemed, the rescue mission was under way. When Flayderman moved to the New American Library, he naturally wanted his new audience to benefit by my discoveries. To produce an NAL version, I recruited a New York University colleague, Mendor T. Brunetti. That gave me a chance to get into print corrections of (innocent) mistakes I myself had made. And in 2001, when NAL decided to do a new edition of Brunetti, they returned the favor by hiring me to write an Afterword that explains the Verne problem to still another audience. But notice—that was still news as late as 2001. Later Taves told me it was the original Miller-Brunetti editions that inspired him to become a Verne scholar. Verne was becoming respectable in the academic world. Stanford Luce wrote the first English PhD. dissertation on Verne, followed soon by Arthur B. Evans and William Butcher, all three leading names in today’s Verne Renaissance. For a while it looked as if we had won. But alas, many commercial publishers continued to put out expensive, beautifully illustrated editions of Mercier Lewis. Most of them were not identified as his work, but most of them featured that “disagreeable territory” (which has become a code-phrase to identify a real Vernian) and whatever other Mercierisms they can get away with. But then, a miracle. Hugh Rawson, one of the great editors of our time (and author of several books on language), came up with a new solution. Why not make our case through ANNOTATED editions? For a start we would reprint the good clergyman’s Twenty Thousand Leagues with all his errors and omissions, adding in brackets my own restorations to bridge the gaps! In annotations and other critical sections, we could make the case for “the real Verne.” Only an editor at a fine old LITERARY publishing house like Crowell could see the value in this venture. So in 1976 they issued the first volume of The Annotated Jules Verne. Crowell ran a three-column ad in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and the main journalist Herbert Mitgang actually treated the new edition as a news article! Volker Dehs, then just fourteen and traveling in America, bought a copy in San Francisco in 1978. In 2003, long after he had become one of our most illustrious Verne scholars, he wrote to me that that edition was “...a revelation to me. You’ve founded a manner of editing Jules Verne seriously that is still lacking even in France.” And when Wolcott published his expose about Mercier Lewis, he included this question and answer: “How do we reach these conclusions? The key came to me when studying The Annotated Jules Verne.” 6 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

In short, it seemed once again that victory was ours. In 1978 Crowell, now a part of Harper Collins, published the second volume, The Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon. This is a complete new translation, with critical materials that show the errors and distortions of the 19th-century editions by Mercier Lewis, Elizabeth King, and Edward Roth. I established Verne as a political writer, proving for the first time in an English book what Jean Chesneaux had said about Verne—-that as a political writer, he ranks with H. G. Wells. I flaunted From the Earth to the Moon as not only a prescient space novel but an anti-war classic on a level with Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Heller’s Catch-22. I showed how once again the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier had diluted Verne’s anti- imperialism and emasculated his anti-militarism. Meanwhile, Harper Collins sold to a Japanese publisher rights to produce an edition of my FTETTM! They have translated even my name Miller into a Japanese ideogram, with just one Verne Americanism left in English—“bugjuice.” In 1995 Gramercy put out an updated edition. Frederick Paul Walter and I are working on a third edition. So at last the rehabilitation of Verne in America seemed safely in progress. Indeed in 1993 we did win a major victory. The Naval Institute Press asked Taves to nominate someone to do a special annotated deluxe edition of TTLUTS. One third through—slowed down by the desire this time to put out the lists of fishes as they are properly called in America—I asked NIP to take Rick Walter on board. He is well-versed in marine biology and technology and actually had his own translation in progress. We joined our efforts. Tom Cutler, our editor, says that our book is their longest title in print. Recently NIP shared with us an option to the movie rights of our version, sold to a free-lance producer. For the first time we might get a REAL Verne movie! Five years after our coffee-table version appeared, William Butcher produced a mass-paperback edition through Oxford University Press. He made us feel good by quoting us 22 times! And so Anglophone readers of Verne now have both quality and mass paperback editions, thoroughly annotated from the historical, biographical, technical, and literary points of view. Brian Taves summed it up when he wrote in the 1999 Summer issue of Extrapolation: “Miller first vividly exposed the drawbacks of earlier translations in the preface to his 1965 edition. Miller elaborated on these problems in his Annotated Verne series and other scholars have since followed his lead.” And so now how has the overall situation changed since the opening campaign of 1965-1978? I have recently canvassed five experts to get an overall estimate of where we stand. Let’s go from the bad news to the best, from what will provoke a scowl on Jules’ face but then restore his 180th anniversary smile. First I consulted the Verne expert at the Library of Congress, Brian Taves, who is also author of numerous papers and books. I got a series of notes like this: “Despite the new translations, this old one from the 1870s is still on bookstore shelves.” And he gave me the amazon.com shot of Kingston’s Mysterious Island! “Despite Tor supposedly being a leading sf publisher, again they use Mercier.” And he gave me amazon’s picture of Tor’s 20K. A worse shock: “Scholastic,” which supplies the schools, “still shovels Mercier at the unsuspecting.” This is the edition that omits more than 50% of 20K——that is, the highly trusted Scholastic cut it yet another 30% after Mercier Lewis’ publisher had slashed it by more than 20%. As Verne Smiles 7

But for both Brian and me, the worst shock came in our perusal of the 2005 Barnes & Noble edition of five novels in one fat book. It shows that now we have made some publishers well aware of the Mercier Lewis problem but they have found a new, unethical way around it. The title page credits the translation to the good reverend, with introduction and notes by Victoria Lake. She lets mistakes like “the disagreeable territory” go by without comment. When she comes to a major omission, like Verne’s “long passage in which Conseil lectures Ned on the scientific classification of fish,” she does acknowledge the literary value of the scene—but still omits it! When she gets to a monstrous error—like Nemo’s steel plates having (get this!) a density of 0.07 to 0.08 of water, she simply says: “The standard translation…, used for this edition, misprints many of Verne’s original and correct figures. Steel has a density of 7.8, not .07 to .08, that of water.” Next in my canvass was Jean-Michel Margot, president of the North American Jules Verne Society and former member of the Société Jules Verne. He emailed me: “My personal opinion is from now on, we will have two JVs who will have nothing to do with each other: the French author and his works (the scholarly side) and…the icon, …used as an idea, a concept, in the way Steve Fosset used it: “I’m a successor of …Verne” (after he had done a World Round Flight without stop…). JV was used as icon by IBM, Toshiba, Nini Ricci, Waterman, Nestlé, and many others. I think it’s the trend, and it’s not our goal to go against it. Our goal is to promote JV as a writer as much as we can.” But I think Verne must be smiling in both versions of himself. He should broaden his smile even more as he hears from my third expert, Rick Walter, vice-president of the NAJVS and adult librarian in Albuquerque. Of the 13 polluted titles available to us in 1965, he now counts 40 new translations! Five have been produced under the aegis of Arthur B. Evans, our expert at DePauw and general editor of the Wesleyan Early Science Fiction Classics. These 40 include translations and/or critical materials by Stan Luce, Edward Baxter, Frederick Paul Walter, and WJM. And Rick counts nine premieres, titles that had never before appeared in English. This bright new crop includes: The Mighty Orinoco translated by Luce, annotated by WJM; The Meteor Hunt translated and annotated by Walter and WJM; and The Kip Brothers, rendered by Luce and annotated by Margot.

Then my fourth expert, the REAL Evans at DePauw, produced for Verniana a new bibliography of all valid translations and critical commentaries published from 1965 to 2007. This can stand as one of Verniana’s first birthday gifts to the Grand Romancer. We are proud to offer this as a separate article, below. Notice that Art sums it up very modestly: “…the rescue seems to be working.” The final expert in my canvass, Terry Harpold, professor at the University of Florida, brings us another kind of gratifying news. On a recent visit to Europe, he learned that the French are preparing their first critical editions of Verne and—they will be modeled on the American annotated versions! This means that America, whose critics once mercilessly beat and denigrated Jules Verne, is now showing his native land a new way to honor him. The Anglophone rescue operation, the rehabilitation, the resurrection of Jules Verne in America can now claim an international victory. And that’s where Verniana enters history. So smile, Jules, smile smile smile. 8 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies

Arthur B. Evans

ABSTRACT

This chronological bibliography provides an overview of English-language editions and scholarship on Jules Verne from 1965 to 2007. It is divided into three parts: new translations of Verne’s works, monographs and other book-length studies on Verne, and shorter critical essays about Verne. The content of this bibliography suggests that both the quantity and the quality of English-language editions and criticism on Jules Verne have increased dramatically since 1965.

RĖSUMĖ

Cette bibliographie chronologique offre un survol des éditions et de la critique de Jules Verne éditées en langue anglaise de 1965 à 2007. Elle est divisée en trois parties: les nouvelles traductions en anglais des oeuvres de Verne, les livres critiques sur Verne, et les articles critiques sur Verne. Le contenu de cette bibliographie suggère que la quantité et la qualité des éditions et des études critiques en langue anglaise sur Jules Verne ont augmenté de façon dramatique depuis 1965.

The following bibliography of English-language editions of and scholarship on Jules Verne is divided into three parts and organized chronologically from 1965 through 2007. The first part lists all new English translations of Verne’s works that are of good quality and noteworthy. Not listed are new translations that are either of poor quality (e.g., abridged or bowdlerized) or those that merely reprint an existing English translation from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. In the second part are listed those English-language monographs, biographies, or other book-length studies on Verne published since 1965. Not included are translations of works into English that were previously published in French or other languages. The third part contains a reasonably comprehensive listing of shorter works of English-language Verne criticism—articles in scholarly journals, introductions to critical editions, etc.—that have added in a significant way to the existing English scholarship on this author. As a general rule, no book or film reviews, university papers, newsletter items, or personal website materials are included in this part. Modern English-language scholarship on Verne began in 1965 with the pioneering work of Walter James Miller. It has come a long way since, and some of the very best studies in the past couple of decades have been Anglo-American in origin. But it must also be acknowledged that—because of poor

9 10 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) translations, Hollywood cinema, and the relentless commercialization of Verne as the “Father of Sci- Fi”—English-language readers have needed more help than their European counterparts in learning about the real Jules Verne. The “rescue effort” discussed by Professor Miller in this issue has played a crucial role in dispelling the many myths and errors that have surrounded Verne and his works in the UK and America. And the rescue seems to be working. As the following bibliography suggests, English-language readers are now witnessing a veritable renaissance of interest in all things Vernian. If this trend continues, the 21st century promises to be very kind indeed to the legendary yet often misunderstood author of the Voyages extraordinaires.

New English translations of Verne’s works published since 1965:

Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Translated by Robert Baldick. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated by Walter James Miller. New York: Washington Square Press, 1965.

Around the World in Eighty Days. Translated by Jacqueline and Robert Baldick. London: Dent, 1968.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated by Mendor T. Brunetti. New York: Signet, 1969. Reprint with a new afterword by Walter James Miller, 2001.

From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Translated by Jacqueline and Robert Baldick. London: Dent, 1970.

From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Translated by Harold Salemson with an introduction by Jean Jules-Verne and illustrations by Robert Shore. New York: Heritage, 1970.

The Annotated Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated and edited by Walter James Miller. New York: Crowell, 1976.

The Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon. Translated and edited by Walter James Miller. New York: Crowell, 1978.

Family Without a Name. Translated by Edward Baxter. Toronto: NC Press, 1982.

The Fur Country. Translated by Edward Baxter. Toronto: NC Press, 1987.

Humbug: The American Way of Life. Translated and edited by William Butcher. Edinburgh: Acadian Press, 1991.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Translated and edited by William Butcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies 11

The Complete Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated and edited by Emanuel J. Mickel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Backwards to Britain. Translated by Janice Valls-Russel, edited and with an introduction by William Butcher. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1992.

Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: The Definitive Unabridged Edition Based on the Original French Texts. Translated and edited by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. Annapolis: US Naval Institute, 1993.

Adventures of the Rat Family. Translated by Evelyn Copeland with an introduction by Iona Opie and an afterword by Brian Taves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Around the World in Eighty Days. Translated and edited by William Butcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Paris in the Twentieth Century. Translated by Richard Howard with an introduction by Eugen Weber. New York: Random House, 1996.

“The Humbug: The American Way of Life.” Translated by Edward Baxter with an afterword by Olivier Dumas. In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, edited by Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk Jr. 73- 85.Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1996. Reprinted in Jules Verne, The Eternal Adam and Other Stories, edited by Peter Costello, 82-107. London: Phoenix, 1999.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Translated and edited by William Butcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Invasion of the Sea. Translated by Edward Baxter, edited by and with an introduction and notes by Arthur B. Evans. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

The Mysterious Island. Translated by Sidney Kravitz, edited by Arthur B. Evans, and with an introduction, notes, and other critical material by William Butcher. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

The Mysterious Island. Translated by Jordan Stump with an introduction by Caleb Carr. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

The Mighty Orinoco. Translated by Stanford L. Luce, edited by Arthur B. Evans, and with an introduction and notes by Walter James Miller. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Magellania. Translated by Benjamin Fry with an introduction by Olivier Dumas. New York: Welcome Rain, 2002.

Journey Through the Impossible. Translated by Edward Baxter, edited by and with an introduction by Jean-Michel Margot, and illustrated by Roger Leyonmark. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003. 12 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

The Adoptive Son. Translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock (2003). Available online at .

The Knights of the Daffodil. Translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock (2003). Available online at .

Mr. Chimpanzee, Operetta in One Act. Translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock (2003). Available online at .

Eleven Days of Siege. Translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock (2003). Available online at .

Michael Strogoff (by Jules Verne and Adolphe d’Ennery). Translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock (2003). Available online at .

A Fantasy of Dr. Ox. Translated by Andrew Brown with a foreword by Gilbert Adair. London: Hesperus, 2003.

The Star of the South. Translated by Stephen Gray. Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2003.

Around the World in Eighty Days. Translated with notes by Michael Glencross and with an introduction by Brian Aldiss. London: Penguin, 2004.

The Underground City. Translated by Sarah Crozier with a foreword by Ian Thompson. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2005.

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Translated and edited by William Butcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

The Children of Captain Grant (by Jules Verne and Adolphe d’Ennery). Translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock (2005). Available online at .

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated by F. P. Walter. Available online at .

The Begum’s Millions. Translated by Stanford L. Luce, edited by Arthur B. Evans, with an introduction and notes by Peter Schulman. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.

An Antarctic Mystery or, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields: A Sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Translated by Mrs. Cashel Hoey, revised and modernized by John Gregory Betancourt. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2005.

The Meteor Hunt. Translated and edited by Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Lighthouse at the End of the World. Translated and edited by William Butcher. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies 13

The Kip Brothers. Translated by Stanford L. Luce, edited by Arthur B. Evans, with an introduction and notes by Jean-Michel Margot. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

Mathias Sandorf. Translated by George Hanna (1889), with “adjustments, modifications, and restorations” by the publisher. New York: ROH Press, 2007.

Monographs and other scholarly books about Verne published in English since 1965:

I. O. Evans. Jules Verne and His Work. London: Arco, 1965.

Peter Costello. Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978.

Peter Haining. The Jules Verne Companion. London: Souvenir, 1978.

Edward J. Gallagher, Judith A. Mistichelli, and John A. Van Eerde. Jules Verne: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

Andrew Martin. The Knowledge of Ignorance from Genesis to Jules Verne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Arthur B. Evans. Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.

William Butcher. Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self: Space and Time in the Voyages Extraordinaires. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Andrew Martin. The Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Timothy Unwin. Jules Verne: Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1992.

Lawrence Lynch. Jules Verne. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Peggy Teeters. Jules Verne: The Man Who Invented Tomorrow. New York: Walter, 1992.

Paul Alkon. Science Fiction Before 1900. New York: Twayne, 1994.

Ron Miller. Extraordinary Voyages: A Reader’s Guide to the Works of Jules Verne. Fredericksburg, VA: Black Cat Press, 1994.

Herbert R. Lottman. Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr. The Jules Verne Encyclopedia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996. 14 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Thomas C. Renzi. Jules Verne on Film: A Filmography of the Cinematic Adaptations of His Works, 1902 through 1997. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998.

Edmund Smyth, ed. Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

W. Sean Chamberlin. The Remarkable Ocean World of Jules Verne: A Study Guide for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2002. Timothy Unwin. Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.

William Butcher. Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006.

Articles, introductions, and other scholarly criticism on Verne published in English since 1965:

Walter James Miller. “Jules Verne in America: A Translator’s Preface.” In Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, translated by Walter James Miller, vii-xxii. New York: Washington Square, 1965.

Damon Knight. “Afterword.” In Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Trans. and ed. Walter James Miller. New York: Washington Square Press, 1965.

Monique Sprout. “The Influence of Poe on Jules Verne.” Revue de littérature comparée 41.1 (1967): 37-53.

Esther S. Kanipe. “Hetzel and the Bibliothèque d’Éducation et de Récréation.” Yale French Studies 43 (Nov. 1969): 73-84.

Winandy, André. “The Twilight Zone: Image and Reality in Jules Verne’s Strange Journeys.” Yale French Studies 43 (1969): 101-110.

Jean Chesneaux. “Jule Verne’s Image of the United States.” Yale French Studies 43 (Nov. 1969): 111- 127.

Marc Angenot. “Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism I.” Science Fiction Studies 1.1 (1973): 33- 37.

———. “Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism II.” Science Fiction Studies 1.2 (1973): 46-49.

Michel Serres. “India (The Black and the Archipelago) on Fire.” Sub-Stance 8 (Winter 1974): 49-60.

Marc Angenot. “Science Fiction in France before Verne.” Science Fiction Studies 5.1 (March 1978): 58-66.

Peter Aberger. “The Portrayal of Blacks in Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires.” French Review 53.2 (1979): 199-206. Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies 15

Darko Suvin. “Communication in Quantified Space: the Utopian Liberalism of Jules Verne’s Fiction.” Clio 4 (1974): 51-71. Rpt. in Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 147-63. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Marc Angenot. “Jules Verne: The Last Happy Utopianist.” In Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder, 18-32. New York: Longman, 1979.

David Ketterer. “Fathoming 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.” In The Stellar Gauge: Essays on Science Fiction Writers, ed. Michael J. Tolley and Kirpal Singh, 7-24. Carlton, Australia: Nostrillia Press, 1980.

Marilyn Gaddis Rose. “Two Misogynist Novels: A Feminist Reading of Villiers and Verne.” Nineteenth Century French Studies 9 (1980): 117-123.

Ross Chambers. “Cultural and Ideological Determinations in Narrative: A Note on Jules Verne’s Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum.” L’Esprit Créateur, 21:3 (Fall 1981): 69-78.

Mark Rose. “Filling the Void: Verne, Wells and Lem.” Science Fiction Studies 8.2 (1981): 121-42.

Andrew Martin. “The Entropy of Bazacian Tropes in the Scientific Fictions of Jules Verne.” Modern Language Review 77 (Jan. 1982): 51-62.

Mark Rose. “Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of Science Fiction.” In Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction, ed. George E. Slusser, 31-41. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Andrew Martin. “Chez Jules: Nutrition and Cognition in the Novels of Jules Verne,” French Studies 37 (Jan. 1983): 47-58.

Andrew Martin. “The Machine Stops: The Breakdown of the Vernian Vehicle.” Romance Studies 3.6 (1985): 63-77.

Everett F. Bleiler. “Jules Verne and Cryptography.” Extrapolation 27.1 (1986): 5-18.

Mark Hammerton. “Verne’s Amazing Journeys.” Foundation 38 (Winter 1986-87): 30-38.

Arthur B. Evans. “The Extraordinary Libraries of Jules Verne.” L’Esprit créateur 28 (1988): 75-86.

Arthur B. Evans. “Science Fiction vs. Scientific Fiction in France: From Jules Verne to J.-H. Rosny Aîné.” Science Fiction Studies 15.1 (1988): 1-11.

Walter James Miller, “Jules Verne, 1828-1905.” In Jane M. Bingham, ed. Writers for Children, 591-98. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988.

Chris Bongie. “Into Darkest Asia: Colonialism and the Imperial Fiction of Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff.” Clio 19.3 (1990): 237-249.

Christiane Mortelier. “Jules Verne and New Zealand.” In John Dunmore, ed. New Zealand and the French: Two Centuries of Contact, 96-111. Waihanae: New Zealand: Heritage Press, 1990. 16 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Beau Riffenburgh. “Jules Verne and the Conquest of the Polar Regions.” Polar Record 27 (1991): 237- 240.

William Butcher. “Jules-Gabriel Verne, 1828-1905.” In Contemporary Authors, 462-65. Chicago: Gale, 1991.

Lambert Wierenga. “The Rhetoric of the Commonplace: Argumentation and Ideology” (Jules Verne and Emile Zola). In Lynette Hunter, ed. Toward a Definition of Topos: Approaches to Analogical Reasoning, 158-181. London: Macmillan, 1991.

William Butcher. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, vii-xxxviii. Translated by William Butcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Arthur B. Evans. “Jules Verne.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers, 1860-1900, ed. Catharine Savage Brosman, 275-97. Chicago: Gale, 1992.

Brian Taves. “Afterword.” In Jules Verne, Adventures of the Rat Family. Trans. Evelyn Copeland with an introduction by Iona Opie, 62-70. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

David Meakin. “Like Poles Attracting: Intertextual Magnetism in Poe, Verne, and Gracq.” Modern Language Review 88 (1993): 600-611.

————. “Jules Verne’s Alchemical Journey Short-Circuited.” French Studies 47.1 (1993): 152-165.

Arthur B. Evans. “Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man’s Eye.” Science Fiction Studies 20 (November 1993): 341-361.

William Butcher. “Jules and Michel Verne.” In Critical Bibliography of French Literature: The Nineteenth Century, ed. David Baguley, 923-40. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994.

Arthur B. Evans. “The ‘New’ Jules Verne.” Science Fiction Studies 22.1 (March 1995): 35-46.

Bud Foote. “Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century: The First Science Fiction Dystopia?” The New York Review of Science Fiction #88 (December 1995): 1, 8-10.

Arthur B. Evans. “Literary Intertexts in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires.” Science Fiction Studies 23.2 (July 1996): 171-87.

Anna E. Hudson. “Discover Paris with Jules Verne.” French Review 70.2 (1996): 245-258.

Edward Baxter. “The Tribulations of a Translator of Jules Verne.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 65-67. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Olivier Dumas, “Afterword: The ‘Humbug’ in its Original Version.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 86-87. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996. Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies 17

Ray Cartier. “Philatelic Tributes to Jules Verne.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 195-203. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

James Iraldi, “A Day in Amiens.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 33-37. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Stephen Michaluk, Jr. “The American Jules Verne Society.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 22-31. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

———. “Jules Verne: A Bibliographic and Collecting Guide.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 89-194. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Brian Taves. “Hollywood’s Jules Verne.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 205-48. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

———. “Jules Verne: An Interpretation.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 1-21. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

———. “The Uncensored Jules Verne: Completing Yesterday and Tomorrow.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 69-71. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

———, ed. “Jules Verne’s Autobiography: A Collage of Interviews.” In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, ed. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, Jr., 39-63. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Eugen Weber. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century, translated by Richard Howard, xi-xxvii. New York: Random House, 1996.

Ross Chambers. “Phileas Fogg’s Colonialist Policy.” In Graham Falconer and Mary Donaldson-Evans, ed. Kaleidoscope: Essays on Nineteenth Century French Literature, 155-164. Toronto: Centre d’études romantiqes, 1996.

Brian Taves. “The Making of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Filmfax 58 (October 1996-January 1997): 44-52, 138-139.

Arthur B. Evans and Ron Miller. “Jules Verne: Misunderstood Visionary,” Scientific American (April 1997): 92-97.

William B. Jensen. “Captain Nemo’s Battery: Chemistry and the Science Fiction of Jules Verne.” The Chemical Intelligencer (April 1997): 23-32.

Ron Miller. “Squid or Octopus? A 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas Mystery.” Extraordinary Voyages 3.3 (September 1997): 3.

Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. “Verne’s Controversial Giant Squid: Continued.” Extraordinary Voyages 4.1 (December 1997): 1-5. 18 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Ron Miller. “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - The Mysterious Giant Squid, Part Three.” Extraordinary Voyages 4.2 (April 1998): 1-2.

William Butcher. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, translated and edited by William Butcher, ix-xlviii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Arthur B. Evans. “The Illustrators of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires.” Science Fiction Studies 25.2 (July 1998): 241-70.

William Butcher. “Long-Lost Manuscript.” Modern Language Review 93.4 (October 1998): 961-71.

David Sandner. “Shooting for the Moon: Méliès, Verne, Wells, and the Imperial Satire.” Extrapolation 39.1 (1998): 5-25. Carter Kaplan. “Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and the ‘Question of the Monster’.” Extrapolation 39.2 (1998): 139-147.

Peter Costello. “Introduction.” in Jules Verne, The Eternal Adam and Other Stories, ed. Peter Costello, v-viii. London: Phoenix, 1999.

Sidney Kravitz. “W.H.G. Kingston’s Translation of The Mysterious Island.” Extraordinary Voyages 5.1 (May 1999): 2-3.

Walter James Miller. “Captain Castagnette and the Baltimore Gun Club.” Extraordinary Voyages 5.2 (July 1999): 3-8.

Frederick Paul Walter. “Chronological Disorder in The Mysterious Island.” Extraordinary Voyages 5.2 (July 1999): 8-9.

Arthur B. Evans. “Vehicular Utopias of Jules Verne.” In Transformations of Utopia, ed. George Slusser et al., 99-108. New York: AMS Press, 1999.

George E. Slusser. “The Perils of Experiment: Jules Verne and the American Lone Genius.” Extrapolation 40.2 (1999): 101-15.

William Butcher. “Mysterious Masterpiece.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 142-57. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Sarah Capitanio. “‘L’Ici-bas’ and ‘l’Au-delà’... but Not as they Knew it. Realism, Utopianism and Science Fiction in the Novels of Jules Verne.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 60-77. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Arthur B. Evans. “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 11-39. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Terry Hale and Andrew Hugill. “The Science is Fiction: Jules Verne, Raymond Roussel, and Surrealism.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 122-141. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies 19

Trevor Harris. “Measurement and Mystery in Verne.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 109-121. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Daniel Compère. “Jules Verne and the Limitations of Literature.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 40-45. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

David Meakin. “Future Past: Myth, Inversion and Regression in Verne’s Underground Utopia.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 94-108. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

David Platten. “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Paris: Paris au XXe siècle.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 78-93. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Edmund J. Smyth. “Jules Verne, SF and Modernity: An Introduction.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, 1-10. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Timothy Unwin. “The Fiction of Science, or the Science of Fiction.” In Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 46-59. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

———. “Technology and Progress in Jules Verne, or Anticipation in Reverse.” AUMLA 93 (2000): 17- 35.

Arthur B. Evans. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, Invasion of the Sea, translated by Edward Baxter, edited with notes and other critical material by Arthur B. Evans, vii-xx. Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

William Butcher. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island, translated by Sidney Kravitz, edited by Arthur B. Evans, and with notes and other critical material by William Butcher, vii-xlix. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

Walter James Miller. “The Real Conseil.” Extraordinary Voyages 7.2 (February 2001): 4-5.

Arthur B. Evans. “Hetzel and Verne: Collaboration and Conflict.“” Science Fiction Studies 28.1 (March 2001): 97-106.

Brian Taves. “The Novels and Rediscovered Films of Michel (Jules) Verne.” Journal of Film Preservation No. 62 (April 2001): 25-39.

Davor Sisovic. “Jules Verne and Croatia.” Extraordinary Voyages 7.3 (August 2001): 13-17.

Peter Schulman. “Paris au XXe siècle’s Legacy: Eccentricity as Defiance in Jules Verne’s Uneasy Relationship with his Era.” Romance Quarterly 48 (Fall 2001), 257-66.

Walter James Miller. “Afterword: Freedom and the Near Murder of Jules Verne.” In Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, translated by Mendor T. Brunetti, 448-61. New York: New American Library, 2001. 20 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Benjamin Sacks. “Jules Verne: A Hotel del Coronado Vignette.” Southern California Quarterly 83.3 (Fall 2001): 239-260.

Eugene J. Surowitz. “Other Verne.” The New York Review of Science Fiction #160 (December 2001): 13-15.

Walter James Miller. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, The Mighty Orinoco, translated by Stanford L. Luce, edited by Arthur B. Evans, and with notes by Walter James Miller, ix-xvii. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

William Butcher and Arthur B. Evans. “The Curate’s Egg: The Translations of (A)Round/A Tour of the World in Eighty Days.” Extraordinary Voyages 9.2 (December 2002): 2-5. Also published as “The Most Translated Verne Novel” Nautilus 2 (Jan. 2002): 6-9.

James D. Keeline. “Who Invented Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle?” Extraordinary Voyages 8.1 (April 2002): 3-7.

Rick Walter. “Verne, Doyle, and Vanishing Diamonds.” Extraordinary Voyages 9.4 (June 2003): 6-7.

Jean-Michel Margot. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, Journey Through the Impossible, translated by Edward Baxter, edited by Jean-Michel Margot, with illustrations Roger Leyonmark, 11-19. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.

William Butcher and John Breyer. “Nothing New Under the Earth.” Earth Sciences History 22.1 (2003): 36-51.

Walter James Miller. “The Rehabilitation of Jules Verne in America: From Boy’s Author to Adult’s Author, 1960-2003.” Extraordinary Voyages 10.2 (December 2003): 2-5.

Robert T. Jeschonek. “Anticipating the Civil War in Poe’s Pym and the 20th Century in Verne’s Sequel, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields.” Extraordinary Voyages 11.1 (September 2004): 2-5, 8.

Benford, Gregory. “Verne to Varley: Hard SF Evolves.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 163-71.

William Butcher. “Hidden Treasures: The Manuscripts of Twenty Thousand Leagues.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 132-49.

Arthur B. Evans. “A Bibliography of Jules Verne’s English Translations.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 87-123.

———. “Jules Verne’s English Translations.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 62-86.

Terry Harpold. “Verne’s Cartographies.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 18-42.

Teri J. Hernández. “Translating Verne: An Extraordinary Journey.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 124-31. Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies 21

Jean-Michel Margot. “Jules Verne, Playwright.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 150-62.

George E. Slusser. “Why They Kill Jules Verne: Science Fiction and Cartesian Culture.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 43-61.

Timothy Unwin. “Jules Verne: Negotiating Change in the Nineteenth Century.” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (March 2005): 5-17.

Jean-Michel Margot. “Jules Verne: The Successful, Wealthy Playwright.” Extraordinary Voyages Special Issue (October 2005): 10-16.

Brian Taves. “Chimp to Man, And Back Again: Verne’s Evolutionary Motif.” Extraordinary Voyages Special Issue (October 2005): 17-18. Brian Taves. “Adapting Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.” Extraordinary Voyages 12.1 (September 2005): 1-12.

Arthur B. Evans. “Jules Verne: Exploring the Limits.” Australian Journal of French Studies Vol. 42, No. 3 (September-December. 2005): 265-275.

Terry Harpold. “The Providential Grace of Verne’s Le Testament d’un excentrique.” IRIS 28 (2005): 157–68.

William Butcher. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, translated and edited by William Butcher, ix-xliii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Peter Schulman. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, The Begum’s Millions. Translated by Stanford L. Luce, edited by Arthur B. Evans, and with notes by Peter Schulman. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005. xiii-xxxix.

Brian Taves. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, An Antarctic Mystery or, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields: A Sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Translation by Mrs. Cashel Hoey, revised and modernized by John Gregory Betancourt. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2005.

Norman M. Wolcott. “How Lewis Mercier and Eleanor King Brought You Jules Verne.” Extraordinary Voyages 12.2 (December 2005): 2-7.

Ian Thompson. “New Light on the Visit to Malta by Jules Verne in June 1884.” Extraordinary Voyages 12.2 (December 2005): 10-12.

Robert Pourvoyeur. “North Against South, Read Another Way.” Extraordinary Voyages 12.3 (March 2006): 1, 9.

Randall J. Osczevski. “Frederick Cook and the Forgotten Pole.” Extraordinary Voyages 12.3 (March 2006): 2-9. 22 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Terry Harpold. “Reading the Illustrations of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires: The Example of Le Superbe Orénoque.” ImageTexT 3.1 (2006), .

Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller. “Foreword.” In Jules Verne, The Meteor Hunt edited by Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller, vii-xxi. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2006.

Arthur B. Evans. “Jules Verne.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. .

Jean-Michel Margot. “The History of ‘Frritt-Flacc’.” Extraordinary Voyages 12.4 (June 2006): 4-5.

Brian Taves. “Origins of ‘A Tale of a Hat’.” Extraordinary Voyages 13.1 (September 2006): 9.

———. “The Jules Verne Renaissance: A Recent Publishing History.” Extraordinary Voyages 13.1 (September 2006): 13-15.

William Butcher. “Tribulations of a Chinese in China: Verne and the Celestial Empire.” Journal of Foreign Languages 5 (September 2006): 63-79.

Timothy Unwin. "Vernotopia (Utopia, Ecotopia, Technotopia, Heterotopia, Retrotopia, Textotopia, Dystopia)." Australian Journal of French Studies 43.3 (September 2006): 333-341.

Jan Witold Weryho. “The Alleged Racism of Jules Verne’s ‘Suttee Romance’.” Extraordinary Voyages 13.3 (March 2007): 1-5.

Arthur B. Evans. “Jules Verne’s America.” Extrapolation vol. 48 (Spring 2007): 35-43.

Brian Taves. “Jules Verne and the Prehistoric Humbug.” Extraordinary Voyages 13.4 (June 2007): 9-10, 12.

Frederick Paul Walter. “The Wrong-Headed League.” Extraordinary Voyages 14.1 (September 2007): 7-9.

William Butcher. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, Lighthouse at the End of the World, translated and edited by William Butcher, vii-xxxix. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Jean-Michel Margot. “Introduction.” In Jules Verne, The Kip Brothers, translated by Stanford L. Luce, edited by Arthur B. Evans, with notes by Jean-Michel Margot, ix-xxix. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

Ian Thompson. “Dramatic Incident of the Saint-Michel III at Saint Malo, 1881.” Extraordinary Voyages 14.2 (December 2007): 1-4. Expedition into a Novel

Brian Taves

ABSTRACT

Emerging out of the distinct tradition of Spanish-language film adaptations of Verne novels, the 2005 Venezuelan movie 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE retells the source novel as an actual experience of the author, becoming a meditation on the novel Le Superbe Orénoque, Verne’s life, and much more. Verne himself and another historical individual, Count Ermanno Stradelli, replace the book’s male protagonists, leaving the androgynous heroine as the other point in the triangle. The modernist dimension of gender roles becomes the basis for a metaphorical exploration of the source of sexual identity that parallels the journey to the source of the Orinoco. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE is also one of the few non-documentary films in which Verne is brought to the screen, becoming here part of the creation of his own text, tapping the sources of inspiration, of love, and of identity.

RĖSUMĖ

Se démarquant de la tradition habituelle des films hispanisants adaptant un roman de Verne, le film vénézuélien de 2005 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE raconte le roman original comme une expérience actuelle de l’auteur et devient une réflexion sur le roman Le Superbe Orénoque, la vie de Verne et bien davantage encore. Verne lui-même et un autre personnage historique, le comte Ermanno Stradelli, remplacent les protagonistes masculins du roman, conservant l’héroïne androgyne comme l’autre sommet du triangle. Le thème moderne des rôles masculins et féminins devient la base d’une recherche métaphorique des origines de l’identité sexuelle qui se déroule parallèlement à celle de la source de l’Orénoque. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE est un des rares films non documentaires dans lesquels c'est Verne lui-même qui est porté à l’écran, devenant ici un élément créateur de son propre texte, s’interrogeant sur les origines de son inspiration, de l’amour et de l'identité.

There is a rich tradition of Jules Verne adaptations produced or co-produced in the Spanish language. From Spain came MATHIAS SANDORF / EL CONDE SANDORF / IL GRANDE RIBELLE (France/Spain/Italy, 1962), THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD / LE PHARE DU BOUT DU MONDE / LA LUZ DEL FIN DEL MONDO / IL FARIO IN CAPO AL MONDO (US/France/Spain/Italy, 1971), UN CAPITAN DE QUINCE ANOS / UN CAPITAINE DE QUINZE ANS (Spain/France, 1972), LA ISLA MISTERIOSA / L'ILE MYSTERIEUSE / L'ISOLA MISTERIOSA E IL CAPITANO NEMO / THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND OF CAPTAIN NEMO (Spain/France/Italy, 1973, television mini-series and feature version), VIAJE AL CENTRO DE LA

23 24 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

TIERRA / THE FABULOUS JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH / WHERE TIME BEGAN (1977), NEMO (1979), MISTERIO EN LA ISLA DE LOS MONSTRUOS / MONSTER ISLAND / MYSTERY OF MONSTER ISLAND (Spain/US, 1981), and LOS DIABLOS DEL MAR / SEA DEVILS (1982). LOS SOBRINOS DE CAPITAN GRANT was brought to the screen in 1969 as a movie and television and for television again in 1977, both times based on the zarzuela from the novel. Note: Capitalized titles are for movies, italicized are for books. So, La Jangada is a book, LA JANGADA is a movie. Other films in the Spanish language, and among the very best interpretations of Verne to the screen, have come from Mexico. These include MIGUEL STROGOFF, EL CORREO DEL ZAR (1943), DOS ANOS DES VACACIONES / SHIPWRECK ISLAND (Spain/Mexico, 1960), and EIGHT HUNDRED LEAGUES OVER THE AMAZON / 800 LEGUAS POR EL AMAZONAS / LA JANGADA (1960). VIAJE FANTASTICO EN GLOBO / FANTASTIC BALLOON VOYAGE / THE VOYAGE / FIVE WEEKS IN A BALLOON (1975) is the only one of the four screen versions of the novel to actually tell Verne’s story, and does so magnificently. In 1993, EIGHT HUNDRED LEAGUES DOWN THE AMAZON emerged as a Peruvian - United States co production, but could not match the magnificent spectacle of the 1960 version. Here is a rich alternate strain distinct from that of Hollywood. Rather than looking to Verne for another “blockbuster,” the author’s own novels of the region have sometimes served as a starting point, as in bringing La Jangada (1881) to the screen, and now Le Superbe Orénoque (1898). In this the Latin American cinema has now made a major new contribution. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE (initially entitled 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE SANTA ISABEL) is a meditation on Le Superbe Orénoque, Verne’s life, and much more. This Cine Seis Ocho/Centro Nacional Autonomo de Cinematografia production was the official Venezuelan entry for the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and is now available on DVD.

1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE opens with Honorine Verne (Elba Escobar) and her husband, a Latin-looking and bearded Jules (Marco Villarubia), quarreling over his Expedition into a Novel 25 determination to travel to the Orinoco River, to gain local color for a novel. He assures her his only mistress is adventure. And, as she points out, he is aging; it may be his last chance to journey to America. He meets Count Stradelli (Ronnie Nordenflycht) and joins him on a boat trip up the Orinoco to learn its source. Stradelli and Verne encounter Jean Dekermore, riding away from bandits, and who is saved by Verne’s rifle fire. Dekermore joins them on the expedition, and explains that he is 17 and searching for his father, lost in this region years before when he had mistakenly believed thought wife and son killed in a shipwreck. Despite the likelihood of his father’s death in the intervening years, Dekermore refuses to believe that he is not still alive. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE emphasizes the travelogue aspects of the novel, highlighted by authentic Venezuelan locations. There are abundant didactic touches revealing the Orinoco that further emulate the flavor of Le Superbe Orénoque and Vernian fiction generally. The melodramatic dangers along the river that the novel had provided are minimized or deleted entirely. The result is a filmic travelogue and character study that comes to define adventure as internal revelation as much as external incident. For Alfredo Anzola, who produced and directed and cowrote the script with Gustavo Michelena and Rafael Arraiz Lucca, Verne is an entirely different type of inspiration than generally found in Hollywood. To underline this distinction, legends of gold hidden atop mountains and elsewhere are mentioned but bypassed by the explorers, seeking instead, as described by Verne in the film, the gold in the human heart. By contrast, a Hollywood version would have found a treasure hunt an irresistible sidelight. The structure of Le Superbe Orénoque is a variation on two novels Verne had written nearly three decades earlier. In Les Enfants du capitaine Grant teenage Mary Grant, together with her younger brother, initiate an around-the-world trek in search of their missing sea captain father. In Les Forceurs de blocus, “John,” joining the Dolphin as an apprentice with her “uncle,” proves to be Jenny Halliburt, determined to persuade the captain to aid her aim of rescuing her imprisoned abolitionist father at the voyage’s destination, Charleston. However, Jeanne de Kermor travels in disguise as a young man for half the novel, again with a friend of her father as supposed uncle, whereas in Les Forceurs de blocus the disguise is brief. Mary was only one of many leading characters in The Children of Captain Grant, and she never sacrificed her femininity. Hence, even considering Jenny and Mary, the Jeanne of Le Superbe Orénoque is one of Verne’s most vivid and proactive literary heroines, like the Nadia of Michel Strogoff, but alone of these, Jeanne elicits a response from the hero of Le Superbe Orénoque that is not only emotional but sexual. And it is this more modernist dimension of the novel, the interest in gender roles, that 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE delineates. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE boils down the novel’s numerous characters to a trio in the interest of exploring the psychology of each and using the mystery of Dekermore’s gender as a vehicle to explore an unusual love triangle. Both Verne and Stradelli take the place of the novel’s Jacques Helloch, dividing his role of ingenue, explorer, hero, and lover. Both Stradelli and Dekermore are thrilled to meet Verne and attest that they have read all of his books. While in some ways idealized, Verne is also reimagined, although retaining many biographical facts. He tells Dekermore that he was shot in the leg by a madman for monetary reasons. When Verne dives into the river to save Dekermore, she remarks that he is as heroic as one of his own characters. 26 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Similarly, Ermanno Stradelli (1852-1926) is also an actual explorer. Hence, in the film both the principal male figures are historical personages, myth and legend blending in a fanciful love story set against a background of exploration, mixing actual deeds (Stradelli) with fictional ones (Le Superbe Orénoque). The result is also patriarchal: masculinity is real, and femininity, whether the female gender or the anxiety that possible homosexual attraction induces, serve primarily to define masculinity and actuality, since Dekermore is the one fictional character who sets into motion the dynamic between Verne and Stradelli. As enacted by the androgynous, unglamourous Kristin Pardo, Dekermore is initially credible in disguise as a woman pretending to be a young man. From the outset, Stradelli finds Dekermore’s motives entirely too melodramatic to be credible, remarking that it sounds more like a Verne story than truth. Indian natives who visit the travelers asking for tobacco at once realize Dekermore’s gender, but the whites believe they have ignorantly made a mistake. Then Verne spies Dekermore undressing to swim, and moments later he must save her when she is bit by an eel. From the Indian’s intuition, and remembering reading in the newspaper years ago of the shipwreck and disappearance of Dekermore, Verne had already guessed her gender. She asks him to keep it secret from Stradelli. Expedition into a Novel 27

The sexual overtones that probably precluded a contemporary English-language publication Le Superbe Orénoque at the time of its initial publication in 1898 (it was published in Spain as El soberbio Orinoco and finally appeared as The Mighty Orinoco in the United States in 2002) thus become the basis of the film. Stradelli calls Dekermore “boy” rather than by his name, Jean, as a way of affirming his belief in Dekermore’s gender and the gulf it creates between them. Stradelli’s frustration at his attraction toward Dekermore, dreaming of making love to the person he believes is another man, leads him to become increasingly ill-tempered. He visits an Indian for information on the river, and in his absence Dekermore reveals herself in a dress to fulfill Verne’s wish, and with the dropping of pretense the two consummate their growing love. Stradelli, unable to cope with his own passions, senses the new link between Verne and Dekermore. Stradelli accuses them of the same homosexual alliance that he fears will be the result of his own passion for Dekermore. She responds by indicating that she is aware that the Frenchman Chaffanjon purportedly has already discovered Stradelli’s goal, the source of the Orinoco. With the trio now alienated from one another, Dekermore departs in the rowboat on her own, and is found the next day barely alive. Stradelli had been reluctant to detour the expedition to stop at the Mission Santa Juana, as recommended by the Indian as the best source for information on Dekermore’s father. Stradelli agrees to go to the Mission, and that even geography takes second place to finding a missing father. From the book, photography becomes a central motif of the movie, and 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE recognizes its own role in sharing the medium. Verne prophecies that it will come to supplement human memory in the future. Taking photographs of Dekermore alongside the verdure, Stradelli realizes he is beginning to fall in love with Dekermore, which he finds utterly inexplicable. Photographs also provide the final traumatic revelation for Stradelli as to Dekermore’s true gender. Just as the image itself has already hinted at, then revealed this fact first to the audience, then to Verne, it is while Verne is photographing Dekermore splashing and emerging naked from the river that Stradelli first fully sees her. At first he is overwhelmed, stalking off, then haunted by the memory of her moving amidst the water. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE uses the androgyny of Verne’s heroine as a way to metaphorically explore the source of sexual identity that parallels the journey to the source of the Orinoco. As the role of still photography to record the journey indicates in the movie, especially with the androgynous motif, a motion picture of Le Superbe Orénoque cannot simply be a straightforward adaptation. The motion picture camera would reveal far more rapidly the guise that the Vernian prose narrative could conceal. Hence, it is inherently more appropriate for the film to examine the nature of this shift, and its impact on others, emphasizing its impact on fewer but deeper characters. Narrative shifts and reinterpretation are essential to relating the story in a visual medium. The search for the source of a river becomes equally the exploration of the source of the movie, the meaning of Le Superbe Orénoque. While some might criticize the film as exploitive for drawing Verne into the affair with Dekermore, in fact it is necessary to explore his character and as part of the journey of 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE into how love affects two divergent men. When Stradelli sees a mountain he must measure its height, while Verne is content with its magnificence. Stradelli explains that he needs truth, while Verne, the writer, can live with lies. Yet Stradelli also wants 28 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) to be swallowed by nature, as he puts it, while Verne, for his part, reckons himself the prisoner of his publisher.

Even when Dekermore’s gender is known to both Stradelli and to Verne, she refuses any sparing of the labors of the journey in deference to her womanhood, insisting on carrying on as she had when impersonating a man. When Verne has an attack of diabetes, Dekermore and Stradelli mistake his prophetic visions for the future of Venezuela as nothing more than delirium.

Verne answers Dekermore’s question about Honorine by explaining that she could not live the artists’s life. He asks Dekermore if she loves him or “Jules Verne,” which he indicates are two distinct entities, which she fails to comprehend. When the younger duo ascend a mountain and Verne is physically unable to follow them, he sees them kissing at its summit. They surprise him upon their return not by declaring their love but that they will go to the mission, believing it, the gold, and the source of the Orinoco are all at one and the same place. Verne knows that youth has called to youth, and will join a band of Indians for the return. He is already converting his experience into prose in his journal. The conclusion is much abbreviated as the movie winds up its 95 minutes. Arriving at the mission, of course the padre there is Dekermore’s father. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE does not even offer an explanation; it is simply the “happy ending” the audience is expected to know will be the outcome. Stradelli plants an Italian flag, for a stream near the mission is indeed the source of the Orinoco, not the one found by the Frenchman. But who will be able to prove it? For 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE, womanhood becomes even more indeterminate than in the novel. Dekermore never settles into feminine garb; while in the red dress once Expedition into a Novel 29 she has found her father, and in which she had introduced herself to Verne before their affair began, while with Stradelli discovering the source of the Orinoco she is once again in pants and male garb suited to exploration. In the final shot, 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE comes full circle. Verne is alone, back at the wheel of his yacht Saint-Michel III–a plate commemorating it had been smashed by Honorine in the opening scene. Verne is a free spirit, a romantic and a man of nature, an inspiration, but it is left to the geographer to fully map the unknown areas of the landscape and the human heart. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE not only emerges from the Spanish- language tradition of Verne filmmaking, but also reveals new possibilities for referentiality, especially in bringing Verne himself to the screen as a character. (I am considering fictional, not documentary, renderings of Verne on the screen here). The conception of Verne as character and writer is wholly different from previous films. In the 1926 French version of MICHEL STROGOFF, an opening scene had showed the writer at his desk composing the novel. Verne took a rather more active role in FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1958), but as “J.V.,” a supporting character whose identity is revealed in the last scene to reveal a “twist ending.” In attempting to assert the triumph of imagination over science, his introduction serves to distract from a muddled conclusion. This portrait is akin to a “real,” not imagined person, unlike the young Verne portrayed in the science fiction television series THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF JULES VERNE (2000). Similarly, the Verne played by Michel Piccolini opposite H.G. Wells and a panoply of individuals of the past in the 18 minute film TIMEKEEPER/ FROM TIME TO TIME / LE VISIONARIUM, shown at various Disney theme parks in the 1990s, was to create a legendary figure, the familiar prophet of the future. THE HALLMARK THEATER: OUT OF JULES VERNE (NBC television, 1954) presented a half hour biographical dramatization of the young writer interacting with Honorine, Felix Nadar, and Hetzel. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE, however, unlike all of these, actually makes Verne part of his own text. It does not do so in the faux manner of THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF JULES VERNE, involving him with the characters of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout in exploits that could not be further from those Verne imagined. Underlying that series was the suggestion that it was these experiences which inspired the writer. By contrast, 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE persuasively involves Verne in the creation of his own narrative, tapping the sources of inspiration, of love, and of identity. Here is a notion of the writer which this time may be lauded, a truly ingenious interpretation but one nonetheless compatible with the novel that inspired it. 30 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) Verne’s Errant Readers: Nemo, Clawbonny, Michel Dufrénoy

Terry Harpold

ABSTRACT

Descriptions of the scene of reading in three Verne novels – Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863), The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869–70) – illustrate a general textual practice which I term errant reading. The errant reader, I propose, shows his mastery of a textual imaginary by reading outside of – around – the units of the page and book, and by recombining elements of a textual field into new sequences. This structure, I conclude, orients both the role of reading in Verne’s fictions and his relations to his literary precursors .

RĖSUMĖ

Les descriptions de scènes de lecture dans trois romans de Jules Verne – Paris au XXe siècle (1863), Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1866), et Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (1869–70) illustrent une pratique générale d’écriture que je nomme la lecture itinérante. Le lecteur voyageur démontre sa maîtrise d’un imaginaire textuel par la lecture en dehors – ou mieux, autour – des unités que sont la page et le livre, et par la recombinaison des éléments d’un ensemble textuel en de nouvelles séquences. Cette structure oriente aussi bien le rôle de la lecture dans les fictions de Verne que ses propres rapports avec ses précurseurs littéraires.

I - Reading Around

The subject of this essay is a way of reading – to be precise, a way of representing the scene of reading – in the fiction of Jules Verne, which I will call errant reading or reading around. My examples of Verne’s errant readers are drawn from three early novels – Captain Nemo (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas [Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers], 1869–70), Dr. Clawbonny (The Adventures of Captain Hatteras [Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras], 1866), and Michel Dufrénoy (Paris in the 20th Century [Paris au XXème siècle], 1863?) – and I will discuss each in the reverse order of his literary creation.[1] Verne is, I propose, working out a model and perhaps a theory of reading in

31 32 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) general, the procedural double of his methods of literary composition, in the decade between his creations of Dufrénoy and Nemo; this is more clearly seen if we work backwards, from 1870 to 1863, rather than in the order in which the novels were written. The method of errant reading is equally as significant in later novels of the Voyages extraordinaires – in relation to an expanding Vernian corpus, it may be more significant in those novels – but the evidence for the method is more subtle in those works, since it has become by then a typical trait of Verne’s textual operations.

Figure 1. Captain Nemo’s library. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers I, xi. Illustration by Alphonse de Neuville (1869–70).

II – Au hasard

Verne shows us how to read around in the description of the most famous of his imagined libraries. [2] We may easily miss the cue. Captain Nemo is leading Professor Aronnax on his first tour of the Nautilus (20M I, xi–xiii). Passing from the captain’s dining room to the adjacent library, Aronnax is astonished by the size and scope of Nemo’s book collection: its 12,000 volumes, he observes with undisguised envy, would honor many terrestrial palaces (Figure 1).[3] Among them, he writes,[4] are “the masterpieces of the ancients and moderns, all of the most beautiful that humanity has produced in history, poetry, the novel, and the natural sciences” [“les chefs-d’oeuvre des maîtres anciens et modernes, c’est-à-dire tout ce que l’humanité a produit de plus beau dans l’histoire, la poésie, le roman et la science”] (20M I, xi).[5] The library is also notably disordered: “Curiously, all of these books were not classified according to any system with respect to the languages in which they were written” Verne's Errant Readers: Nemo, Clawbonny, Michel Dufrénoy 33

[“Détail curieux, tous ces livres étaient indistinctement classés, en quelque langue qu’ils fussent écrits”]. This disorder proves, Aronnax conjectures, “that the captain of the Nautilus could read any of the volumes upon which his hand should chance to fall” [“que le capitaine du Nautilus devait lire couramment les volumes que sa main prenait au hasard”] (20M I, xi). On its face, the jumble of Nemo’s shelves seems a minor element of the novel’s narrative mechanics: either the trait of a library well- and often-used (in which case its disorder does not advance the story in any important way); or a datum meant to sharpen the reader’s curiosity (in which case we presume that the messy shelves are a clue). Uncommon ease in such a library as this: only an expert of many disciplines and languages could have created the technological marvel that is the Nautilus. A vast and subtle collection without an ordering scheme: the intrigue of Nemo’s origins – the novel’s great enigma – is sustained; no signal will be found in the arrangement of his books regarding his mother tongue or the nation of his birth. Yet Aronnax remarks that he finds the library’s disorder unexpected, un détail curieux. In the previous chapter, Nemo claimed fluency in four of the six languages represented by authors Aronnax discovers in the library. Later events indicate that the captain of the Nautilus speaks at least a fifth language, in addition to the mysterious lingua franca used by his crew.[6] Evidence on his bookshelves of Nemo’s linguistic competence, then, should not be especially noteworthy. Aronnax’s surprise and his way of accounting for the jumble requires the conjecture of another scene, which he never witnesses and never describes to the reader. He must imagine – we must imagine – Nemo reaching to a volume at random and reading from it, with an attitude combining pure spontaneity and absolute ease – a sort of hazardous care: artful but unmannered, the sign of an assured familiarity with every outcome that might be presented to the hand and eye by such a method.[7] For its implicit textual sociality, such a gesture is imagined to take place in physical isolation. Nemo, we soon learn, reads alone in the still of night or during those times when he seems to be absent from the Nautilus. He leaves opened and annotated books scattered about the library, from which Aronnax decodes the breadth and variety of his host’s literary habits.[8] The minor datum of the jumble thus crosses over into a pure convention of the reading scene: the image of a master-reader in solitary meditation amid the farrago of his texts – Nemo as a submarine Jerome (as the saint is often depicted) encircled by careening piles of books and papers, his eyes on the page but his mind directed elsewhere. In that scene, categorical disarray is, ironically, the surest sign of an implied textual system: for such a reader, the chaos of his shelves and lectern mark merely an indifference to any one book taken alone, or with regard to a prescribed scheme of classification; each is valued according to its role in multiple, transbibliographic regimes, which obtain in the moment in which it is read. Bibliographic disorder also proves this reader’s redoubtable literary competence: that he can assign any book – whichever his hand may fall upon – to its proper place in a textual imaginary demonstrates that he reads outside of – around – elementary units of the page and the book. They are disordered on his shelves; the master- reader grasps them in terms of other orders and in his own terms.

III – A shell to his liking

Such a reader also defines with his hand and eye his position in the textual imaginary. As the Forward prepares to leave Liverpool for a destination as yet unknown, Dr. Clawbonny (The Adventures of Captain Hatteras [Voyages et aventures Capitaine Hatteras]) packs his tiny cabin on the ship with his instruments and books (Figure 2). 34 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

“The happiest animal,” he observes, “would be a snail that can grow a shell to its liking” [“un colimaçon qui pourrait se faire une coquille à son gré.”] “And, upon my word,” the narrator adds, his cabin was soon turned into a shell that he would not need to leave for a long time. The doctor gave into the delight of the specialist or the child while putting his scientific baggage into order. His books, his herbaria, his precision instruments, his physics apparata, his collection of thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, and rain gauges, lenses, compasses, sextants, maps, diagrams, vials, powders, the flasks of his complete traveling pharmacy – all of it was arranged with an order that would have shamed the British Museum. This space of six square feet contained incalculable riches; the doctor had only to reach out his hand to instantly become a physician, a mathematician, an astronomer, a geographer, a botanist, or a conchologist.

Figure 2. Clawbonny in his shell. Les Aventures du capitaine Hatteras I, iv. Illustration by Edouard Riou (1866).

[Et ma foi, pour une coquille qu’il ne devait pas quitter de longtemps, sa cabine prenait comme tournure; le docteur se donnait un plaisir de savant ou d’enfant à mettre en ordre son bagage scientifique. Ses livres, ses herbiers, ses casiers, ses instruments de précision, ses appareils de physique, sa collection de thermomètres, de baromètres, d’hygromètres, d’udomètres, de lunettes, de compas, de sextants, de cartes, de plans, les fioles, les poudres, les flacon de sa pharmacie de voyage très complète, tout cela se classait avec un ordre qui eût fait honte au British Museum. Cet espace de six pieds carrés contenait d’incalculables richesses; le docteur n’avait qu’à étendre la main, sans se déranger, pour Verne's Errant Readers: Nemo, Clawbonny, Michel Dufrénoy 35 devenir instantanément un médecin, un mathématicien, un astronome, un géographe, un botaniste ou un conchyliologue.] (CH I, iv). How does Clawbonny know in advance that he will need all these things? He doesn’t know; moreover, it will turn out that he won’t use most of them and all of them will be lost with the destruction of the Forward at the end of Book I (CH II, i). The value of knowing or not knowing turns out, moreover, to be a more complicated matter. Stocking a reader’s cabinet with scientific instruments in addition to books doesn’t alter the fact that methods of research are determined by the shape and order of the cabinet. It’s the thoroughness of the narrator’s catalogue that matters above all in this scene of contented categorization, in that it establishes conditions of use that should recall to us the characteristic operations of Nemo’s library. The resources that Clawbonny arranges in the confines of his cabin similarly cross a wide range of disciplines without settling for long on any one; Clawbonny is able to grasp them all with the same assured gesture; whatever his other talents may be, the doctor is a man who knows how to use a library effectively. As improbable as it may seem, the value of that particular talent on a polar expedition will be proven repeatedly in later chapters, when Clawbonny moves the adventure forward or saves the lives of himself and his companions by summoning from memory a crucial datum he has read. He does this with uncanny accuracy; the reader will often feel – justifiably – that Clawbonny is reading to her verbatim from a text ready at hand. The formidable memory of the book-man [homme-livre] (Lidenbrock, Clawbonny, Paganel, Palmyrin Rosette, Cyrus Smith, etc.) is among Verne’s signature contrivances. Notably, in the case of Clawbonny, the connection of the contrivance to specific conditions of reading is spelled out for us. Early in the novel when he is asked by Richard Shandon if he knows where the Forward is bound, Clawbonny protests that he doesn’t know, but that this doesn’t bother him much.

People say that I’m learned; that’s a mistake, commander: I don’t know anything. If I’ve managed to sell a few books, I was still wrong; the public is very kind to buy them! I don’t know anything, I repeat, except that I know nothing. Now someone has offered to complete or, rather, to reconstitute my knowledge of medicine, surgery, history, geography, botany, mineralogy, conchology, geodesy, chemistry, physics, mechanics, and hydrography; well, I accept and I assure you that there’s no need to beg!

On dit que je suis un savant ; on se trompe, commandant : je ne sais rien, et si j’ai publié quelques livres qui ne se vendent pas trop mal, j’ai eu tort ; le public et bien bon de les acheter ! Je ne sais rien, vous dis- je, si ce n’est que je suis un ignorant. Or, on m’offre de compléter, ou, pour mieux dire, de refaire mes connaissances en médecine, en chirurgie, en histoire, en géographie, en botanique, en minéralogie, en conchyliologie, en géodésie, en chimie, en physique, en mécanique, en hydrographie ; eh bien, j’accepte, et je vous assure que je ne me fais pas prier! (CH I, iii)

The doctor, in fact, knows a great deal about polar geography, history, hydrography, and the rest, but he knows only what he has read about these things – that is, he knows only what Verne has read about them. (And, as William Butcher has shown, Verne gets many facts wrong because his sources are often in error.)[9]We might therefore conclude that Clawbonny has joined the expedition because he seeks more practical foundations for his book-learning, but this would mistake the essentially unpragmatic foundation of his interests. It’s not what he says, in any case, and if we trace his character over the course of the novel, it would be difficult to say that he has become a more practical man at the end of the adventure. That kind of transformation would not be typical of Verne, whose book-men are never changed in that way. 36 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Clawbonny’s Socratic demurral – Verne expects us to have read Plato’s Apology and to know what it signifies when a wise man protests his ignorance – is not about the content of his knowledge but about its conditions.[10] His interest in the Forward’s mysterious voyage is simply that it offers him an opportunity to extend his research program. That’s why each of the disciplines he enumerates for Shandon will be represented by at least one of the elements inside his shell, all arranged so that he doesn’t have to leave the shell in order to master them, and so that the whole may be moved in space while it is brought into use. (Mobilis in mobile: the library-as-snail shell – or as –submarine – is an internally complex but integrally transportable unit of a larger textual system.[11]) And it is why, indirectly, Clawbonny’s response to Shandon is echoed by the final paragraph of Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s 1866 “Avertissement de l'éditeur,” printed in the first single-volume edition of Hatteras, in which Verne’s publisher announces the mandate of the newly christened Voyages extraordinaires: [Verne’s] aim is to summarize all geographical, physical, and astronomical knowledge gathered by modern science, and to reconstitute in the alluring and picturesque manner that is his trademark, the history of the universe. [Son but est, en effet, de résumer toutes les connaissances géographiques, géologiques, physiques, et astronomiques amassées par la science moderne, et de refaire, sous la forme attrayante et pittoresque qui lui est propre, l’histoire de l’univers.] (CH [Hachette ed.], 8) Practical applications of these disciplines is not at stake; worldmaking – the refashioning (refont) of a universe according to narrative and textual programs – is. Clawbonny’s complaint that, despite having sold a few books (the public is very kind to buy them!), he is still inexperienced (ignorant) speaks also to Verne’s position as a novelist in 1865, when only three of the Voyages had been completed and the future success of the series was by no means assured. As an authorial practice, worldmaking requires a system of one’s own. Clawbonny’s arranging his cabinet according to an order that would shame the British Museum – in other words, superficially in the opposite state of the disorder of Nemo’s shelves – should not distract us from the fact that the order, however saturated, is Clawbonny’s alone; its logic is subjective and playful, akin, says the narrator, to a child’s fiddling with arrangements of her toys. Which is to say, it is an activity not in search of a single best order but of prolonging the pleasures of reordering and recombining – very different and, fundamentally textual, pursuits. The contents of Clawbonny’s snail shell represent in this regard less a model of scientific interdisciplinarity than its frankly literary variant – or even, of literariness tout court. This is how one becomes a Vernian book-man of the first rank: by reaching out with confidence into a textual field, taking from it whatever is needed and, more generally, situating oneself somewhere in the field in whichever role it requires, and then recombining it all into new sequences. That the final item in the list of professions that the cabin offers the good doctor is that of a shell-specialist (conchyliologue) must be one of Verne’s winking nods to the reader regarding the structure of the scene: if you know how to read appropriately in this field you can become a specialist of its contours. Verne's Errant Readers: Nemo, Clawbonny, Michel Dufrénoy 37

IV – Literary fragrances

But you have to learn how to read in this way. In the longest of three chapters of Paris in the 20th Century [Paris au XXème siècle, 1863?] detailing the decline of artistic culture in the modern city, Michel Dufrénoy spends a day with his uncle Huguenin in the latter’s modest apartment. After lunch, their conversation turns to Huguenin’s vast book collection, which covers nearly every surface of the apartment. Every wall is lined with shelves, and volumes spill over into the bedroom, are stacked on the furniture and over the doors, and fill an unused fireplace. The piles of books on the windowsills are so high, the narrator reports, that sunlight can enter the apartment through a sliver of exposed glass only on the day of the summer solstice (P20 x). In this cramped space – it seems to fuse the enclosure of Clawbonny’s cabinet with the abundance of Nemo’s library – Huguenin leads his nephew on a tour of literary giants, most from the 19th century, whose works have been forgotten and whose contributions have been eclipsed by the 20th century’s fetishizing of machinery and manufacture.[12] At the end of this parade of specters – Huguenin refers to them as an Army of Letters[13] – Michel slips into a reverie as he surveys his uncle’s collection.

Figure 3. Left: Verne’s writing-cabinet from 1882 until 1900, 2 rue Charles Dubois, Amiens. Right: the adjacent library. Photographs by C. Herbert (1895). Source: Belloc 1895, 209–10.

He took up several of these beloved books, opened them, read a sentence from one, a page from another; from this one only the names of the chapters, from that one only the titles; he drew in that literary fragrance that rose to his brain like a warm emanation of centuries past; he grasped the hand of all of these friends of the past that he would have known and loved, had he but had the good sense to have been born sooner! [Il prit quelques-uns de ces livres si chers, les ouvrit, lut une phrase de l’un, une page de l’autre, ne prit de celui que les têtes de chapitre et seulement les titres de celui-là; il respira ce parfum littéraire qui lui montait au cerveau comme une chaude émanation des siècles écoulés, il serra la main à tous ces amis du passé qu’il eût connus et aimés, s’il avait eu l’esprit de naître plus tôt !] (P20 x) We are already within a space and moving along a trajectory that Nemo, Aronnax, and Clawbonny will inhabit with greater confidence. Michel’s feelings of belatedness satisfy a crucial formal and 38 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) narrative requirement of the novel: Verne needs a hero who grasps the depredations of an anti-literary modernity, but who also enters the scene too late and is haunted by nostalgia for a lapsed literary world. [14] Michel’s naïve enthusiasm for the paratextual apparatus of his uncle’s library (the names of chapters, the titles of books, etc.) is that of the novice reader who has no experience of the institutions of literary culture, a behavior we might observe in any child first learning to read. His childlike relation to books is confirmed by another scene of apprenticeship in the novel, when he works as a reader of financial data recorded by Quinsonnas in the Grand Ledger of Casmodage et Cie. The Ledger, essentially a gargantuan book, is three meters high and outfitted with a system of moving ladders that allows its user to travel up, down, and across its pages, who is not only dwarfed but infantilized by its operations.[15] Literary culture no longer exists in the twentieth century, we are reminded again and again in the novel; it has withdrawn to the cramped living quarters of an old man who may be the last master reader of the modern age, and who is reluctant to pass his obsessions on to his nephew (P20 iv).[16] The only evidence that culture may still operate in a larger sphere is, ominously, the names engraved on the crumbling sepulchres of authors and artists in the Cimetière Père-Lachaise that Michel feverishly reviews in the novel’s final chapter – demonstrating thus without understanding it that literariness can be sustained by units in series that are more accidental and opportunistic than progressive or conclusive. (The perversity of Michel’s failure at the Grand Entrepôt Dramatique, where plays are manufactured according to specified programs, and appropriated from prior texts [P20 xiv], is that he struggles to embrace formulae that will be crucial to Verne’s eventual success as an author.) The exemplarity of Nemo’s jumbled shelves becomes clear in retrospect: a disorderly library is one that has been subjected to extra-bibliographic – but not extra-textual – forces. And – like the other reading cabinets in Verne’s fiction – its effects are activated by movement, which stands always (though not only) for a way of subjectively connecting points of relay between its elements. Et in pulverem revertis;[17] or if not to dust, all disperses into a “literary fragrance” of centuries past, a perceptual metaphor for the diffuse, decentered experience of reading a general textual field. Michel wanders longingly in that field; that is his pathetic function in the novel. But he is incapable of reading in a manner appropriate to the field.[18] Hetzel was right: Michel is a silly, a puerile poet.[19] But he’s a poorer, an inexperienced, reader. One of the challenges of the novel, for which Verne was not quite ready in 1863, is how to depict in sympathetic terms a reader who is incapable of comprehending his textual condition. His talents for nuance and irony are not yet up to the task. Verne shows us the textual and intertextual bases of Michel’s plight, but he isn’t sufficiently confident of his technique to wrestle it from the anxiety of influence that errant reading may induce in the writing subject. How else do we explain a work written in earnest by an aspiring young novelist that imagines no future for literary endeavor, if not in terms of the oppressiveness of the systems of influence to which the novelist knows he belongs? The writer most obviously missing from Huguenin’s review of the nineteenth century is Jules Verne, and that absence is as much due to the constraints of a fantasy of belatedness as to the author’s discretion. In the early 1860s, Verne, a famously omnivorous reader – such that our understanding of errant reading can only be shaped retrospectively by the reader that Verne will become – has yet to assert his place in the literary imaginary.[20] He will require another three decades to openly claim mastery of the fantasy in The Sphinx of the Ices [Le Sphinx des glaces, 1897], when he dares to revise Edgar Allan Poe, whose shadow looms over these systems nearly from their inception.[21] Reading ahead and then back again helps us to discern the actual locus of change in these examples. We can thus mark some relations of influence, repetition and revision of Verne’s scenes of errant Verne's Errant Readers: Nemo, Clawbonny, Michel Dufrénoy 39 reading, but we should resist the temptation to reduce them to a series, above all, to one that progresses from the overburdened shelves of Huguenin’s cramped apartment, via Clawbonny’s orderly if still packed shell, to the sleek rayons of Nemo’s mobile library, and beyond. Verne’s technique evolves and matures, he grows more confident of his apparatus and more subtle in how he applies it, but all the elements of the reading scene are there from the beginning; their recombinations in the later works demonstrate a basic pattern throughout Verne’s career as a reader and an author, which is not, or not consistently, developmental. Errant reading dictates – the fundamental program of the Voyages extraordinaires demonstrates – another conception of literary influence and continuity.

Abbreviations used for works by Verne

500: Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum (1879) 5S: Cinq Semaines en ballon (1863) 20M: Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (1869–70) CB: Claudius Bombarnac (1892) CH: Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1866) ÎH: L’Île à hélice (1895) ÎM: L’Île mystérieuse (1874–75) P20: Paris au XXe siècle (1863?) MV: La Maison à vapeur (1880)

WORKS CITED

Belloc, Marie A. 1895. “Jules Verne at Home.” The Strand Magazine IX (February): 206–13. Butcher, William. 2006. Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Dumas, Alexandre. 1998. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo. Eds. Catherine Eugène and Claude Aziza. Paris: Presses Pocket. Dumas, Olivier. 2006. “Paris au XXe siècle revisité.” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne (NS) 159: 29– 31. ———. 2007. “Paris au XXe siècle revu et corrigé: Les Années 1863–65 de Jules Verne.” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne (NS) 164: 4–6. Evans, Arthur B. 1988. “The Extraordinary Libraries of Jules Verne.” L’Ésprit créateur 38.1: 75–86. Harpold, Terry. 2005. “Verne, Baudelaire et Poe – La Jangada et ‘Le Scarabée d’or’.” Revue Jules Verne 19–20: 162–68. Martin, Charles-Noël. 1978. La Vie et l’œuvre de Jules Verne. Paris: Michel de l’Ormeraie. Plato. 1982. Euthyphro / Apology / Crito / Phaedo / Phaedrus. Trans. Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Swift, Jonathan. 1957–69 [1726; 1735]. Gulliver’s Travels. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 11. Ed. Herbert Davis. Oxford: Blackwell. Verne, Jules. 1864. “Edgard Poë et ses œuvres.” Musée des familles (April): 193–208. ———. 1966–71. Les Œuvres de Jules Verne. 50 vols. Lausanne: Éditions Rencontre. 40 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

———. 1978. Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1994. Paris au XXe siècle. Ed. Piero Gondolo della Riva. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1998. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Ed. and trans. William Butcher. London: Oxford University Press,. ———. 2005. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Ed. and trans. William Butcher. London: Oxford University Press.

NOTES

1. Abbreviated hereafter as 20M, CH, and P20, respectively. See “Abbreviations used for works by Verne,” above, for other abbreviations used in this essay. On the disputed dates of Verne’s authorship of P20, see Dumas 2006 and 2007. 2. On the libraries of the Voyages, see Evans 1988. 3. Aronnax guesses initially that the library includes six or seven thousand volumes. Nemo supplies the correct number (20M I, xi). The abundance and exoticism of Aronnax’s first meal aboard the submarine is offered in sharp contrast to the severe appointments of the captain’s dining room. The riches of Nemo’s library repeat and reinforce this ratio of (material) asceticism and (imaginative) excess, further extended by the artistic and zoological treasures displayed in the adjoining parlor. We encounter here a typical Vernian crossing of quantitative and qualitative inversions: a reduction or division on one register – the heroes are stranded, separated or taken captive; the mechanical constraints of a vehicle limit what may be contained or carried within it – generates a surplus in another register: technical novelty, intellectual or material wealth, national or scientific renown, thrilling adventure, romance, etc. For example, in ÎM Western civilization is reconstructed in miniature from a single match and a few stray seeds found in a jacket lining. This ratio may also operate inversely: burying the martyred French missionary, the balloonists of 5S discover rich deposits of gold near the earth’s surface (“Australia and California brought together in the heart of a desert!”] 5S xxiii). But the limited carrying capacity of the balloon prevents them from taking away more than a little of the precious mineral, all of which they will be later forced to jettison as ballast. And so on: this pairing of movement and negation (or reversed movement and surplus) is a basic structural trait of Verne’s writing. 4. “Among them, he writes…” – I observe here a central conceit of 20M, that Aronnax is the text’s author. Here and elsewhere, all translations from the French are mine. 5. The only deficit of the library is in titles concerning political economy, which appear to have been systematically excluded (20M I, xi). 6. Nemo claims to speak French, English, German, and Latin (20M I, x). His trading with pearl divers near the island of Crete (II, vi) suggests that he has some Greek, leaving only Italian not directly accounted for among the native tongues of the authors Aronnax mentions. 7. An implicit aesthetic of the library’s disorder is foregrounded a few pages later by Aronnax’s discovery of the paintings hung in the adjacent salon in a “pêle-mêle artiste” more appropriate to a painter’s atelier than to an engineer’s laboratory (20M I, xi). This scene of textual disarray (pêle- mêle – an unusual substantive in Verne, most often applied to the effects of natural forces (see, for example, 5S xxxiv)) – returns with sinister significance near the end of Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum (1879). Exploring the abandoned city of Stahlstadt, Marcel Bruckmann and Octave Sarrasin, discover that the abandoned offices of Herr Schultze are overrun with unopened packages and letters: “It seemed as though the main post office of New York or Paris had been sacked and Verne's Errant Readers: Nemo, Clawbonny, Michel Dufrénoy 41

thrown wildly around the room…” [“On eût dit que le bureau central des postes de New York ou de Paris, subitement dévalisé, avait été jeté pêle-mêle dans ce salon…”] (500 xvii). Schultze is dead in the adjacent secret laboratory, a victim of an accidental release of the chemical weapons of his factory-city. Schultze is shown thus to have been an excessively focused intertextual reader: because all operations of Stahlstadt were under his centralized control, his failure to keep up communication with the city’s beleaguered workers has given them an excuse to flee. Or perhaps he is the insufficiently generative intertextual reader: literally frozen (by a blast of liquid carbon dioxide), he has failed to keep up with the (textual) output of his invention. 8. Among the books Nemo consults is a well-thumbed copy of Aronnax’s own Les Mystères des grands fonds sous-marins, which Nemo has heavily annotated, “sometimes contradicting my theories and systems” (20M II, xi). An off-stage reading and writing practice in this case doubles another, also implied: Nemo’s corrections of Aronnax’s first book anticipate those comprised by its sequel: Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers. 9. Cf. Butcher’s extensive documentation of Verne’s sources for 20M (Verne 1998) and CH (Verne 2005). 10. Plato 1982, 21a–23b. 11. Verne reuses the snail shell figure in this way twice in later novels. In The Steam-House [La Maison à vapeur, 1880], Maucler compares the traveling house (outfitted with a library, of course), to a snail shell that one can leave and return to at will, “the latest word in progress in travel!” (MV I, ii). In Claudius Bombarnac (1892), Bombarnac compares the stowaway Kinko’s crate in the luggage compartment of the Grand Transasiatic to a snail shell (CB vii). Kinko is never described as reading, but he does have a light inside his crate and we may imagine that he passes at least some of his time in his tiny quarters engaged in that activity – like Ned Land in his cabin awaiting the appearance of the Nautilus (20M I, v). 12. The literature of the modern era, Michel has discovered, is represented by titles such as Theory of Frictions (in 20 volumes), Practical Treatise on the Lubrication of Driveshafts, Meditations on Oxygen, and Decarbonated Odes. These examples of a literature-to-come (and, in a later chapter of P20, of a music-to-come: Quinsonnas plays for Michel a “Grand Fantasy on the Liquefaction of Carbonic Acid”) are meant to be both ridiculous and alarming. Verne will fine-tune his talent for extended satire in later novels (The Baltimore Gun-Club trilogy and, above all, Propeller Island [L’Ile à hélice, 1895]), but he seems in P20 closer in spirit to Jonathan Swift than in any of the Voyages extraordinaries. Though the analogy is not, to my knowledge, substantiated by Verne’s text, Michel is a sort of modern Gulliver and Paris a modern Laputa, the absurd flying island of Gulliver’s third voyage, where Gulliver encounters numerous devotes of peculiar habits of reading, writing, and speaking. 13. The martial metaphor is noteworthy, as the narrator reports earlier in the novel that military conflict has all but ended in the twentieth century, having been replaced by conflicts of the market. Hugenin’s library is the literary double of the Champ de Mars of 1863. 14. Cf. Michel’s failed effort earlier in the novel to procure copies of works by Hugo, Balzac, de Musset, and Lamartine, at Paris’s largest bookstore (P20 iv). Verne returns to this scene of literary neglect in IH, which is set in an undefined period of the twentieth century. The Librarian of Standard-Island is perhaps its least busy official, because few of its citizens bother to read any more. Many books have been recorded on phonographs: “one presses a button and hears the voice of an excellent speaker who does the reading” (IH vii). Some of the Island’s newspapers, published primarily for pleasant distraction, are printed in chocolate ink on digestible pastry, so that they may be eaten as soon as they are read. 15. The Ledger may be another Swiftian intertext of P20, as it resembles the huge Brobdingnagian 42 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

books that Gulliver reads with the aid of “a moveable pair of stairs” that allows him to walk the length of each line before descending to read the one below it (Swift 1957–69, book 2, chap. 7). 16. This specific conjunction of concentrated space with the figures of the master reader and his naïve apprentice suggests a primitive scene for Verne’s imaginary libraries: Dumas père’s description of Abbot Faria’s mental library, with which he trains the unlettered Edmond Dantès (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, chs. 16–17). 17. The title of the concluding chapter of P20 (xvii). 18. Conseil, the irrepressible taxonomist, is similarly limited in his reading abilities: he can classify all the divisions of the units presented to him, but he can’t associate them in new ways. Aronnax is an apprentice master reader – further along than Michel, perhaps at the level of Clawbonny. But he’s still stuck inside a bookish textual order. He needs to be shown by Nemo how to move along the relays of the Verniverse in order to discover its possibilities. 19. Cf. Hetzel’s rejection of the MS of P20, Gondolo della Riva, “Préface.” 20. We can guess with fair accuracy the kinds of fiction that Verne is reading before the mid-1860s (mostly in the Romantics: Dumas, de Vigny, du Musset, Goethe, Hugo, Schiller, etc.); in addition, at one time or another he was a passionate reader of Cooper, Dickens, Shakespeare, Sterne, and of course Poe (all in translation); despite his distaste for the psychological novel and literary naturalism, he professed admiration for Maupassant and Zola. The astonishing scope of his reading in the historical and scientific literature of his time is well-documented and –evidenced by the technical content of the Voyages. What is difficult to estimate is how, apart from obvious borrowings from identifiable sources, Verne’s reading during a given period may have shaped his writing during or after that period. (Butcher’s 2006 biography is probably the best overall guide to such parallels as can be deduced.) But the scene of errant reading does not require so specific a connection in order to demonstrate its effects: we don’t know much about what Nemo reads but we can be sure that he reads with exceeding aptitude and diversity of interest; errancy itself is a proof of mastery. As a whole, the universe constituted by the Voyages and the texts they cite, to which they allude, or which may be discerned in their background, presents itself as the product of such a program of reading. 21. Poe is not included among the authors – exclusively French – mourned by Michel and Huguenin, but Verne must have been reading the American author in Baudelaire’s translations about the time he wrote P20, as his essay on “Edgard Poë [sic] et ses œuvres” for Musée des familles was published in April 1864. The essay, more an appreciation than an analysis of Poe, is surprisingly superficial and unnuanced, but it demonstrates clearly that Verne found Poe’s formalism and textual artifices compelling. It seems reasonable to assume that a crucial difference between P20 and the novels of the Voyages extraordinaires is, not the unpolished earnestness and dystopian themes of the former, but that the Verne of P20 has yet to fully absorb lessons of reading Poe. Cf. Harpold 2005. Jules Verne’s visits to Gibraltar in 1878 and 1884

Ian Thompson & Philippe Valetoux

ABSTRACT

Gibraltar occupied a special place in Verne’s creative life, both as a geographical locale and as a symbol of British imperialism. He frequently alluded to Gibraltar in his Voyages extraordinaires[1] and in his satirical short story, Gil Braltar[2] he lampoons the Garrison which secured British control of the colony. This fascination with the “Rock” was greatly enhanced by the fact that he twice visited Gibraltar in the Saint-Michel III, in 1878 and 1884. This paper reconstructs the detail of these two visits by reference to Verne’s own rather terse notes in his carnets de voyage, and by fieldwork, interviews and archival work conducted in Gibraltar in 2008. Relevant features are indicated in the accompanying map. In addition, doubt is expressed on the version of events published by M. Allotte de la Fuÿe.[3]

RĖSUMĖ

Gibraltar a occupé une place spéciale dans la vie créative de Verne, à la fois comme lieu géographique et comme symbole de l’impérialisme britannique. Il a souvent fait allusion à Gibraltar dans ses Voyages extraordinaires[1] et dans sa nouvelle satirique Gil Braltar,[2] il tourne en dérision la Garnison qui a assuré la domination britannique sur la colonie. Cette fascination exercée par le “Rocher” fut fortement accrue par les deux visites qu’il fit à Gibraltar sur le Saint-Michel III en 1878 et en 1884. Cette communication reconstruit en détail ces deux visites en se référant aux notes plutôt succintes de Verne lui-même dans ses carnets de voyage et grace à des recherches sur le terrain, des interviews et un travail sur les archives effectués à Gibraltar en 2008. Les détails pertinents sont indiqués sur la carte ci-jointe. En outre, la version des faits publiée par M. Allotte de la Fuÿe[3] est mise en doute.

Verne’s first visit, 1878

At noon on Wednesday 19th June 1878, the steam yacht Saint-Michel III anchored at Gibraltar. The Saint-Michel was the pride and joy of Jules Verne, then aged 50, and at the height of his fame and fortune. It was a magnificent iron vessel of almost 70 tons, 107 feet in length and only two years old. In addition to a two cylinder engine driving the yacht’s screw, the twin masts carried a powerful set of sails. She was capable of a speed of 11 knots. With a crew of ten and comfortable passenger accommodation, the Saint-Michel was ideally equipped for long distance cruising in Europe and the Mediterranean.

43 44 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

The Garrison newspaper, The Gibraltar Chronicle, announced her presence on Thursday 20th June as follows: “R.Y.C. steamer St. Michel (J.Verne, Esq., owner on board), Mr E David [captain], 4 hours from Tangiers – cleared to Sea”. Jules Verne’s visits to Gibraltar in 1878 and 1884 45

The Saint-Michel had arrived on the short crossing from Tangiers to make a sightseeing visit before continuing the voyage to Malaga, Tetouan, Oran and Algiers. Verne was accompanied by his brother Paul and the captain was E. David, the first captain of the yacht before being succeeded in 1879 by Charles-Frédéric Ollive. Verne disembarked by ship’s boat to Waterport Wharf to clear customs and quarantine and then strolled along the Line Wall fortifications and visited “The Convent”, the Governor’s official residence, to pay his respects to the Governor, Lord Napier of Magdala (see Map 1). On his voyages, Verne made a habit of calling on local dignitaries and French diplomats. As there was only a handful of permanent French residents, and given that Gibraltar had a colonial rather than a national status, there was no French diplomatic representation. Verne had always been fascinated by fortifications and cannons and continued his exploration along the Line Walls as far as the Southport Gate. From here he was drawn to the sound of military music on the Grand Parade Ground and spent some time listening to the band and enjoying the Alameda Botanic Gardens. The band would have been either that of the 4th Regiment Black Watch or the 7th Regiment Highland Light Infantry, both of which were based in the garrison at that time. The bandstand was located on the site of the present cable car station and the fire brigade, the remainder of the former parade ground being occupied by parking and by housing, reflecting the shortage of space for development in the town. Verne next made his way back into the town along Main Street as far as the bustling market area around Commercial Square, the “piazza”. Here his eye was drawn to the handsome four storey façade of the newly-opened Royal Hotel opposite the Exchange, where table d’hôte dinner was served at 7pm. Over the decades, the hotel deteriorated in terms of its clientele, becoming popular with sailors in particular, attracted by the cabaret artistes, but fortunately has been preserved and renovated and is currently a fashion boutique. After dining, Verne made his way back to the Saint-Michel and was aboard by 10pm. It had been a long day, involving an international voyage and several hours exploring Gibraltar on foot. The following morning, having already been cleared to sail by the Captain of Port, Verne set sail early for Oran in Algeria in poor weather which delayed his arrival there until the 22nd June. So ended his first visit to Gibraltar. It had been a rapid reconnaissance, but it had stimulated his literary imagination.

The second visit, 1884

Six years elapsed before Jules Verne once more anchored at Gibraltar. This was his second Mediterranean cruise and was his last voyage aboard the Saint-Michel before selling her, most probably as a result of the high cost of maintaining the boat and its large crew at a time when his income from royalties was declining. He left the port of Nantes on 13th May, 1884 and in bad weather only reached Vigo on the 18th. After engine repairs he anchored at Lisbon on the 22nd. From there Verne hoisted sail on the 25th and made rapid progress to Gibraltar, arriving at 4 in the afternoon. His diary comments on the lighthouse on Europa Point and the presence of a German gunboat on the anchorage. This was in fact the Möwe, commanded by Captain Hoffman which had also arrived from Lisbon. Although not mentioned by Verne, three French commercial vessels were at anchor, from Oran, Naples and Tangier respectively. Once again, The Gibraltar Chronicle recorded Verne’s arrival in its supplement of Monday 26th May. 46 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Landport Wharf, 1878, showing in the foreground the customs and police controls and, in the distance, coal hulks

“French steam yacht St.Michel (J.Verne, Esq. owner, on board). Mr C Ollive [captain] 12 days from Nantes and 2 ½ from Lisbon – cleared to Sea”. Verne stayed aboard the Saint-Michel and his carnet accurately records the firing of the cannon at 7.45pm warning of the imminent closure of the Landport Gate to Spain. He admired the view of the site of Gibraltar in the evening and resolved to revisit the town the following day. Rising early, as was his practice throughout his life, Verne headed for Main Street, the principal artery of the garrison town, where he remarked on the motley crowd. He noted the veiled women, women with handkerchiefs on their heads, Arabs, Moroccans and Africans, together with British soldiers. Once more he visited the Alameda Gardens and inspected the batteries. He returned along Main Street pausing at the Universal Café for an afternoon tea. Unlike the neighbouring Royal Hotel building which still stands, the Universal Café, a two storey building which stood opposite the Speed Wine Merchants shop which still exists, has disappeared and has been replaced by a modern building. Returning to the Saint-Michel, Verne took on coal for the next leg of his cruise, which was to take him to North Africa, Malta, where he was almost shipwrecked, and to Rome, where he and Mme Verne were received by Pope Leo XIII on 7th July before continuing the return to France by railway.[4] Jules Verne’s visits to Gibraltar in 1878 and 1884 47

On deck at 10 on the morning of the 26th, Verne set sail at 11. Rounding Europa Point, Verne marvelled at the vertical Eastern flank of The Rock with its glacis of eroded rock. He wrote ecstatically in his carnet that there was no finer sight in the world! At some stage in his visit he had seen the apes and in his diary makes a note to himself : “Gibraltar captured by the apes. A short story to write”. This he did three years later with the title Gil Braltar.[5] We can thus date the provenance of this short story exactly as the 26th May 1884 at approximately 11.30am! Gil Braltar is the name given by Verne to a minor and demented Spanish nobleman unable to accept the capture of The Rock by Britain. He is portrayed as having pronounced ape-like features and virtually lives like one in the scrub and caves, including the cavernous St Michael’s cave. Because of his name, he considers that he is entitled to own The Rock and to this end, dons an ape skin and leads a rebellion of the apes against the General in charge of the garrison, General MacKackmale.[6] In the resulting struggle, Gil Braltar is captured and the apes beat a retreat along Main Street, through the South Gate and return to their hill. Their leader is not an escaped Gil Braltar but the general himself. He has put on the captive’s ape skin, and in the semi darkness is undistinguishable from him. The deception is all the more effective as General MacKackmale also has ape-like features! The conclusion drawn by Verne is that the British Government has managed to secure its hold on The Rock by always sending the ugliest possible generals to command the Garrison so that the apes would confuse them with their leader! In spite of this rather wicked little story, Verne found much to admire in Gibraltar. Although Verne found warfare and political turmoil disturbing, he was fascinated by the heavy weaponry and the strong fortifications [7] and on reaching Malta carried out a similar examination of the defences there.

M. Allotte de la Fuÿe’s version of the 1884 visit

In her biography of Verne, M. Allotte de la Fuÿe claims that on his arrival in Gibraltar, Verne was enthusiastically greeted by officers of the garrison and taken to their mess, returning to the Saint- Michel inebriated and unsteady on his legs after consuming numerous cocktails.[3] The Gibraltar Chronicle, founded in 1801, was essentially the garrison’s newspaper, yet beyond the bland facts of the arrival of the Saint-Michel and her clearance for departure, there is no mention of Verne’s visit in 1884. The only evidence she produces for this is the alleged exercise book diary kept by Verne’s nephew Maurice who was a passenger, along with his father Paul Verne, aboard the Saint-Michel. For a number of reasons this episode seems highly unlikely and not least because in his carnet Verne states that he remained on board on the evening of 25th May. It must be stressed that Gibraltar was not a conventional port. It was a military garrison with an anchorage and after a history of sieges by the Spanish (and the French), strict military control was enforced. Similarly, the importance of quarantine clearance reflected the prevalence of epidemics. In fact, in 1884 there was a cholera epidemic in France and so the Saint-Michel would have been carefully scrutinised. Verne records the firing of a cannon, probably from the King’s Bastion saluting base, at 7.45pm. This warns the population that the Landport Gate, the controlled access point between Gibraltar and Spain, would soon close. Once closed the key was taken to the Governor and was in fact his badge of office and features on Gibraltar’s coat of arms. Thus any Gibraltarians in the North Front would need to enter the town and people without permission to reside in Gibraltar would be obliged to leave. Verne refers to the cannon as the “First Gun” in Gil Braltar. Non-Gibraltarians, like Verne, would have required a special permit to be ashore in the evening and after mid-night a virtual curfew was installed and anyone in the streets was required to carry a lamp 48 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) so that they could be identified by patrols. The Military Orders books, a substantial vade mecum of local orders applying to the garrison, indicate that members of the military were no less subject to rigid discipline than the civilian population.[8] Controls on the use of alcohol in particular were very strict and although several officers’ messes existed, the notion of Verne being involved in excessive drinking is unlikely. The most central mess was opposite the Garrison Library (which was also used for entertaining). Although Verne would probably have been accorded a pass if requested for him by officers, he would have needed to have been rowed ashore from the Saint-Michel to Waterport Wharf and returned again by ship’s boat, being subject to inspection by guards on both occasions. The main officer’s mess was located quite close to the Governor’s Residence and would have been in a heavily patrolled area of the garrison. Allotte de la Fuÿe’s account seems to give the impression of Gibraltar being a port, where civilians could just walk ashore at will. Nothing could be further from the truth. Gibraltar at that time was essentially a military garrison, with a relatively small and controlled civilian population of approximately 15,000.[9] Apart from the trade to supply the Garrison, especially cattle from Morocco and fruit and vegetables from Spain and Portugal, many of the commercial vessels would simply call to take coal onboard. This was achieved by tying up to hulks and coal would be taken aboard in baskets by “coal haulers” using gangplanks to move from one vessel to the other. Verne coaled the Saint-Michel on both his visits to Gibraltar. Further doubt can be cast on the Allotte de la Fuÿe version by the fact that a relatively banal supposed event in Gibraltar was recorded in Maurice’s diary whereas the much more dramatic events at Malta, in which Maurice was directly involved, which would surely have been recorded in his diary, are not even mentioned in her biography. Similarly, the happenings at Sidi Yussef Bay on Cap Bon Tunisia, are recorded in Verne’s carnets as mild horseplay rather than an encounter with threatening “Senussi” tribesmen. The supposed diary written by Maurice Verne has not been found in the public domain. If such a written document exists, a plausible theory is that it might have been a letter written by Maurice, to his mother perhaps, and that as an impressionable youth accompanying a world famous author, he may have exaggerated his account. It is also well known that Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe had a propensity to invent dramatic effects.[10] Until such time, if ever, that Maurice’s diary is discovered, the authenticity of her account can only be evaluated by juxtaposing it with Verne’s own entry in his carnet to the effect that he remained in the Saint-Michel at the time when he was supposedly carousing with British officers.

Conclusion

In spite of the malicious portrayal of the British in Gil Braltar, Verne found much to admire in Gibraltar. Although having a distaste of disorder and war, Verne was fascinated by the weapons and accoutrements of warfare. The fortifications and batteries of Gibraltar were immense and impregnable and were matched by an equally strong internal control of the diverse population and visiting commercial traders from Spain and North Africa. The vertical east face of the Rock, with its glacis of eroded sand, impressed Verne as one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen. We can assume that Gil Braltar was at least partially written tongue in cheek as a satire rather than as an intentionally offensive attack. Finally, no evidence has been found to sustain the claim that Verne enjoyed hospitality to the point of inebriation at the officer’s mess.[11]

Jules Verne’s visits to Gibraltar in 1878 and 1884 49

NOTES

1. Olivier Dumas, Jules Verne et Gibraltar, Jules Verne, l’Afrique et la Méditerranée, (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005), 59–65. 2. Gil Braltar, (Paris: Hetzel, 1887). 3. Allotte de la Fuÿe, M., Jules Verne, sa vie, son oeuvre, (Paris: Hachette, reedition, 1953). 4. Thompson, I.B. and Valetoux, Ph., La visite de Jules Verne à Malte en 1884, Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne, No 159, 2006, 42–47. The fact that the Saint-Michel took on coal on both visits to Gibraltar reflected the limited capacity of coal storage on board. The coal available at Gibraltar would have been of good quality because of the needs of the Royal Navy. 5. Alain Braut has shown that an earlier version of Gil Braltar was published in Le Petit Journal du Dimanche, No 134, 1887, with slight variations as compared with the Hetzel edition. 6. In fact the “apes” are macaques, tail-less monkeys originating in Morocco, Macaca sylvanus. In naming the British general “Mac Kackmale”, it is widely accepted that Verne is offensively referring to him as a male monkey (macaque mâle)! 7. The fortifications were established during the Moorish occupation lasting over six centuries. The British elaboration of the fortifications in the nineteenth century was in part achieved by convicts despatched from Britain. For views of the fortifications and Gibraltar in general at the time of Verne’s visits, see the remarkable large photographic collection made by George Washington Wilson held by the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, which can be viewed on line (University of Aberdeen Photographic Archive, key word George Washington Wilson Collection). 8. General Regulations and Standing Orders for the Garrison of Gibraltar, established by Lt. General Sir Alexander Woodford, Governor, and printed at the Garrison Library. 9. H.W. Howes, The Gibraltarians, (Gibraltar: Medsun, 3rd Edition, 1991). 10. See, for example the comments by Weissenberg and by Maudhuy. Weissenberg, E., Jules Verne un univers fabuleux, (Lausanne: Favre, 2004) 28–33. Maudhuy, R., Jules Verne. La face cachée, (Paris: France-Empire, 2005) 69–70. 11. Details of Verne’s voyages to Gibraltar were provided by Philippe Valetoux, (see Philippe Valetoux, Jules Verne en mer et contre tous, Magellan, Paris, 2005).

Verne’s Carnets de Voyages are held by the Municipal Library at Amiens, (Ms 101440095, Saint- Michel). Archival and field work in Gibraltar was conducted by Ian Thompson.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable help of the following persons in Gibraltar; Lorna Swift (Librarian of the Garrison Library), Professor Clive Finlayson and Dr Darren Fa (Gibraltar Museum), Dominique Searle (Editor, Gibraltar Chronicle) and Tito Benady (Historian and Publisher). The accompanying photograph in this article is reproduced by kind permission of the Gibraltar Museum. 50 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation

Brian Taves

ABSTRACT

Jules Verne’s The Kip Brothers (Les Frères Kip, 1902) has typically been analyzed in several ways. It is viewed as a tribute to his late brother Paul; for its resemblance to the contemporary Dreyfus and Rorique Affairs; and for its concluding “science fiction”-style discovery of the reflection of the murderers in a photograph of the dead victim’s eyes. I propose a new interpretation of The Kip Brothers, examining how the conventions of the adventure formula are reflected in the novel’s narrative. Not only does it encompass adventure’s typical view of colonialism, but in a manner similar to Mathias Sandorf, The Kip Brothers is indebted to The Count of Monte Cristo by Verne’s mentor Dumas. Examining a specific type of adventure, the genre type with a maritime setting, The Kip Brothers follows the type’s pattern of illustrating injustice at sea and how it is overcome. The Kip Brothers echoes the fundamental example of the sea formula, the Bounty saga, a historical incident Verne had previously utilized as the basis for a short story. Similarly, James Cook, the explorer whose deeds occupied such a major part of the 18th century volume of Verne’s Discovery of the Earth: History of the Great Voyagers and Great Navigators (Découverte de la Terre. Histoire générale des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs), serves not only as the name of the principal vessel in The Kip Brothers but a yardstick by which the heroism, and the martyrdom, of the Kips and Captain Gibson are measured. In all of these ways, The Kip Brothers becomes an exemplar of the sea adventure, and the use of this particular formula facilitates a novel highlighting political issues at the time of its composition.

RĖSUMĖ

Le roman de Jules Verne Les Frères Kip (1902) peut être lu selon différents points de vue. On peut le considérer comme un hommage indirect de Verne à son frère Paul ou comme une réflexion sur l'affaire Dreyfus à travers la réécriture de l'histoire des frères Rorique. Le dénouement du roman fait appel à un thème de science- fiction par la découverte des meurtriers dont l’image reste gravée dans la rétine de la victime. Cet article propose une nouvelle interprétation des Frères Kip en analysant comment les conventions du récit d’aventure sont respectées par la narration du roman. Non seulement le récit respecte les traditionnels points de vue colonialistes, mais d’une manière analogue à celle de Mathias Sandorf, Les Frères Kip s’inspirent du Comte de Monte-Cristo. Lu comme une aventure maritime, le roman traite du thème de l’injustice en mer et de la manière de la résoudre. Les Frères Kip se fait l’écho de la formule maritime type, la saga du Bounty que Verne avait précédemment pris pour sujet d’une nouvelle. De manière semblable, James Cook, l’explorateur dont les voyages occupent une grande place dans le volume de Verne sur les navigateurs du dix-huitième siècle Découverte de la Terre. Histoire générale des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs, devient non seulement le nom du plus important navire dans Les Frères Kip, mais aussi le moyen de mesurer l’héroïsme et la souffrance des frères Kip et du capitaine

51 52 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Gibson. De ce point de vue, Les Frères Kip est un modèle d’aventure maritime et l’utilisation d’un tel cadre facilite la mise en lumière des problèmes politiques à l’époque de sa rédaction.

The Kip Brothers (Les Frères Kip, 1902) is conventionally examined as Verne’s salute to his brother Paul and an indirect meditation on the Dreyfus affair through a retelling of the incident of the Rorique brothers. Occasionally the novel’s denouement is studied as an attempt to enliven the tale with science. However, these avenues leave out a dimension, the reason Verne set such a story of injustice within the specific generic boundaries of a maritime adventure. This form’s conventions render The Kip Brothers an ideal vehicle for such a social parable, and make it the logical successor to the sea adventure’s model, the mutiny of the Bounty, an incident which Verne years earlier had made part of the Extraordinary Voyages.

I.

Because of Verne’s association with science fiction, the most noted element The Kip Brothers is the penultimate discovery, through photography, of the reflection of the last image the murder victim saw in life–his murderers. While some have seen in this a touch of science fiction, it was a common belief at the time.[1] Moreover, it occurs only in the very last pages of the novel, and is decidedly reminiscent of the restoration of the hero’s sight in Michael Strogoff, itself strictly an adventure novel without scientific aspects. Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation 53

Throughout The Kip Brothers there are allusions to seeing, sight, and eyes, foreshadowing the climax of the novel. (At the time of composing The Kip Brothers, Verne was losing his own eyesight due to cataracts.) No less than for Strogoff, this deus ex machina is necessary, this time to finally bring about the revelation of the guilty party.

II.

The Kip Brothers uses the theme of two brothers, this time the idealized opposite of the evil brothers of The Steam House and North Against South. Pairs of beneficent brothers had appeared in Sab and Sib of The Green Ray, and later in Marc and Henri Vidal in The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz.[2] The title, The Kip Brothers, is expressive of its content in heightening the emphasis on the fraternal bond, and is the only one of Verne’s novels named for two siblings of the same gender.[3] The Kips are not the only fraternal characters. The near-brotherly behavior of Flig Balt and Vin Mod, who think and act as one, provide a balance in a pair who are evil counterparts of the pure, turn- the-other-cheek goodness of the Kips. While undergoing terrible travails, from shipwreck to unjust imprisonment, the Kips resist despair and even escape when it is open to them, after helping the Fenians to assert their own independence. Their behavior contrasts strongly with that of Balt and Mod. Repeatedly foiled by the failure of situations to favor their planned mutiny, they finally kill the captain themselves. Thus Hawkins, the ship’s owner, unaware of the truth, has little choice but to promote Balt, as second in command, to captain. He will later be dislodged from this position for incompetence, and replaced by Karl Kip. Verne’s brother Paul, his closest friend and confidant, died the year before he began writing The Kip Brothers, and the novel is often regarded as a tribute to him, especially considering that Paul was a mariner like the Kips. Pieter Kip is primarily dedicated to the family business, while his brother has been the true man of the sea, reflecting the distinction between the Verne brothers, the man of letters and the sailor.[4] In Port Arthur, even more than freedom from imprisonment, the brothers will desire to be together. (303) However, to focus primarily on the fraternal aspect in analyzing The Kip Brothers is a mistake, since a quarter of the book is past before the title characters are introduced, rescued from a shipwreck similar to The Children of Captain Grant and Mistress Branican. The setting and conflict are all thoroughly introduced before the Kips come on the scene.

III.

The Dreyfus affair is too well-known to need comment here, and another basis for The Kip Brothers was the Rorique brothers, accused of hijacking a schooner and several of the crew. They claimed innocence, and were sentenced to death by a French tribunal based only on the evidence of the ship’s cook. After a public outcry, upon learning of past heroic behavior by the Roriques, the sentence was successively commuted to only 20 years. Verne publicly discussed the Rorique impact upon The Kip Brothers, which he had originally entitled Les Frères Norik. At the time, even after the Dreyfus case 54 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) had been exposed, the injustice perpetrated against the Roriques was considered far more serious, especially since one of the Rorique brothers had died while imprisoned, and they lacked what were regarded as the “rich and powerful” allies of Dreyfus.[5] Such accounts of unjust imprisonment as suffered by the Roriques were not unusual at the time, and the only individual who shared a by-line with Jules Verne in his novels experienced a similar odyssey. [6] Paschal Grousset (1844-1909) wrote the first drafts of The 500 Million of the Begum (1879) and The Star of the South (1884), but received no public recognition for his contribution. Publisher Jules Hetzel had sent Grousset’s manuscripts to Verne beginning in 1877 when Grousset was a young and untried author with many literary notions similar to Verne’s.[7] Although the arrangement might seem unfair, in fact it was necessary because Grousset was in exile. He was a leader of the Paris Commune during the siege of the Franco-Prussian War, and was captured and sent along with other Communards to New Caledonia. However, in 1874, after two years in captivity, Grousset and three others escaped to Australia and a hero's welcome before continuing on to America and England. He soon became an author in his own right, known by his pseudonyms of André Laurie in fiction and Philippe Daryl in nonfiction, and was able to return to France after the amnesty of 1880. When The Wreck of the Cynthia was published in 1885, credit went to both Verne and Laurie as coauthors--although the book was largely Grousset's work, and was published outside the Extraordinary Voyages.

IV.

Hence, such accounts of unjust, and sometimes political, imprisonment, as suffered by the Roriques, Grousset, and Dreyfus were relatively common. Indeed, they were readily found both in fact as well as fiction, and one reason the Rorique’s tale had such public resonance may have been because it fit so closely the outline of a fictional adventure tale. The Kip Brothers is another example of the words Alexander Dumas fils referred to when he spoke of the relationship between Verne and his father in the preface in Mathias Sandorf, “There is between the two of you a literary kinship so obvious that, in terms of literature, you are more his son than I am.” The Kips, like another archetypal adventurer before them, find on returning to port innocently that they are the victims of a conspiracy which sends them to the worst of prisons. Like Edmond Dantès, returning to Marseille and having inherited on the voyage a captaincy with a bright future before him, the Kips find in Balt and Mod a set of conspirators just as devious as Danglars, Villefort, and Mondego in creating a circumstantial case. Instead of the Château d’If, the Kips are incarcerated in Port Arthur. Rather than by the beneficent Abbe Faria, the Kips are rescued by the Fenians and the faith of Hawkins in proving their case. Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation 55 56 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Adventure dramatizes the exploits of the challenges faced in the past of kings and battles, rebellion, piracy, exploration, the creation of empires, and the interplay of power between the individual and national authority. What is unique to adventure is the element of altruism: the adventurer lives by a code of conduct that includes idealism, honor, patriotism, and chivalry. This impels individualistic, armed rebellions for freedom, with outlawry sometimes the only recourse against injustice or totalitarianism. Within the world of adventure, mankind's past is conceived as a progression toward responsible self-government. The fundamental narrative movement from oppression to liberation encompasses such classic figures as Monte Cristo, King Arthur, Robin Hood, or his Spanish California equivalent, Zorro, and the French Revolution clone, the Scarlet Pimpernel, or, from another setting, Fletcher Christian. The adventurer must exhibit moral courage with a willingness to risk "his personal safety by attempting to perform difficult tasks" and displaying resourcefulness--“virtues such as courage, fortitude, cunning, strength, leadership, and persistence” in overcoming danger and villainy. [8] The settings, not only temporally but geographically, are remote from what is mundane to the intended audience, but do not transcend the borders of fantasy or future technology. Adventure as a generic tradition peaked during the 19th century, celebrating the rise of individual freedom and self-determination, usually in a nationalistic context. Burgeoning popular literature attracted a new readership, lower class industrial workers intrigued by the appeal to the imagination, an ingredient largely absent in the domestic novels of the educated elite.[9] The modern adventure story is generally traced from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but properly commences with Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas establishing its conventions. Verne followed in their footsteps, and had learned the form by the time of his early stories A Drama in Mexico, Martin Paz, A Winter Amid the Ice, Pierre-Jean, San Carlos, and The Siege of Rome. Although science fiction was the most original and influential aspect of his work, more than half of Verne’s oeuvre belongs to different genres, primarily adventure, along with comedy and mystery.[10] The adventure formula allowed Verne to maintain his astonishing output of one or two novels annually, and his success with the genre was notable, especially with his literary and theatrical hits, Around the World in Eighty Days and Michael Strogoff. Joining him were W.H.G. Kingston, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Baroness Orczy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Karl May, Jack London, and Joseph Conrad. The tradition of adventure quite naturally allied with an interest in geography and science in the “Extraordinary Journeys,” along with the now largely forgotten geographical tomes Verne authored. Adventure heralded exploration and the establishment of overseas empires, with the inherently contradictory mix of enlightening and uplifting in the name of nationalism and Christianity, regardless of the opposition found in the distant colonial lands. Hence, the occupying race, not the rebelling natives, are portrayed as representing the move toward a freer society. Soldiering in the colonies, and suppressing native rebellion, became a formula that would proliferate throughout the popular literature of the time, especially in writing aimed at boys, the future officers of empire.[11] A new impetus to adventure writing and the development of the genre occurred with the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, central to two of Verne’s novels, The Mysterious Island and The Steam House. Popular literature sought to understand how the vaunted white imperialist presence came so close to being overthrown by a supposedly primitive Eastern people. Vernian adventures usually concern a journey and survival, combining travel, geography, a touch of mystery, and sometimes even comedy. Unlike most adventure writers, Verne had artistic and political Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation 57 sympathy with colonial struggles for liberation, and his viewpoint was far in advance of the predominant white man's burden theme of the late 19th century. He preferred the sympathetic treatment of the plight of the oppressed, white or native, in such books as The Jangada, The Archipelago on Fire, North Against South, Family Without a Name, Caesar Cascabel, The Mighty Orinoco, Scholarships for Travel, and The Invasion of the Sea. In other ways, he undercut the ethics of adventure, as in his parables of greed gone amuck, Wonderful Adventures of Master Antifer (1894) and The Golden Volcano (1906). In The Kip Brothers, conquests and its consequences are regarded as essentially inevitable, and the treatment of colonialism expresses the typical view of adventure. There are comments on the natural life of the region; Verne notes that the Maoris are on their way to disappearing, given the predominant alcoholism, especially of the women, and the missionaries causing a change in their diet away from cannibalism. (60-62) Verne mentions the death of the last representatives of the indigenous black population of Tasmania, and predicts it will also come about in Australia, under British rule. (204) However, when Hawkins speculates on outfitting the James Cook for whaling, Captain Gibson remonstrates that he will not take up that trade, echoing environmental concerns that Captain Nemo had expressed before him. However, in a manner typical for adventure, while the impact on native peoples and culture might be viewed with equanimity, other aspects of the colonial condition, such as the injustices it perpetrated among the whites who came in contact with it, would be decried. The Kip Brothers was such a novel, with its depiction of not only the injustice under British colonial rule in distant lands. Sentiment is against the Kips at least partly because of English nationalism. As British imperial dominion cemented its hold around the world, admirable Englishmen had begun to disappear from Verne's novels. Balt begins by claiming mutiny was justified because a Briton has the right to refuse to serve under the orders of a foreigner, “a Dutchman! ... That is what pushed us to revolt against Karl Kip.” (249) As Verne later comments, “In the general hatred felt for the murderers of Captain Harry Gibson, there entered a great measure of that egotism so visible among the Saxon races, the proof of which no longer needs to be shown. It was an Englishman who had been killed; they were foreigners, Dutch, who had been condemned.” (276) A striking ellipsis between chapters 7 and 8, as the Kip’s sentence is commuted from hanging to hard labor, allows them to be next seen, after the Hobart Town courtroom, in Port Arthur, making the abrupt experience of prison all the more odious. “The cat-o’-nine tails, in the hand of a vigourous guard, would lash the back of the prisoner who was stripped to the waist, streaking his flesh and transforming it into a bloody pulp.” (296) While in choosing not to use such colonial outposts of his homeland as Devil’s Island, but in those of Britain, the story’s reception at home was eased, it also insured that it would not be read by English-speaking countries.[12] With chapter 10, The Kip Brothers moves in an entirely new direction, with a fresh subplot that underlines both the anti-British elements as well as the theme of injustice, through an encounter with political prisoners. The Kips find their own sentence reflected in the simultaneous incarceration of the Fenians, O’Brien and Macarthy, who sought to free “Ireland from the intolerable domination of Great Britain ...” (313) Here is another echo of Grousset’s experiences, who, after his escape and before the amnesty, lived in America and promoted the Irish cause, including writing the book Ireland's Disease. The fact that Verne includes in the mix not only the Kips who might be seen as standing in for Dreyfus/Rorique/Grousset, but also the Fenians and a general attack on British colonial practices, indicates that the novel needs to be read more broadly for embodying an overall ideology, that of the adventure genre. 58 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Imprisoned with the Kips, the Fenians are placed alongside the worst criminal elements, with whom they have nothing in common. They had been betrayed by informers, but accepted imprisonment rather than reveal their co-conspirators. (316) Hence England is associated not only with unjust colonial rule, but maintaining power through the most disliked of personal attributes–a snitch. By contrast, says Verne, who also wrote of British oppression in Ireland in Little Fellow, “Many a time this sort of devotion could be found among the Fenians, where there exists a solidarity that goes as far as sacrificing one’s life for a cause.” (317) As Karl Kip later notes of O’Brien and Macarthy, “Their only crime is to have dreamed of independence for their country.” (331)

When the Fenians escape, they are about to be intercepted by prison guards in chapter 13 when abruptly Verne changes point of view with the intervention of the Kips. At once it becomes their story, the injustice of their own situation that is the metaphorical basis for the novel. The United States, to which the Fenians can flee and which shelters those who seek a free Ireland, is lauded, and Verne is careful to not limit their reception to the Irish-American community. “The newspapers celebrated noisily the success of their escape and gave honor to those who had prepared it, almost like a revenge of Fenianism.” (372) Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation 59

V.

Verne’s previous sea adventures have a very different focus than The Kip Brothers. The Children of Captain Grant and Mistress Branican both told of a search for a shipwreck survivor. A Floating City was a travelogue, and The Blockade Runners set against the American Civil War. Wonderful Adventures of Master Antifer recounted fortune hunting carried to its extreme and ultimate failure. The archetype of the sea adventure is the 1789 mutiny aboard the H.M.S. Bounty on the return voyage from Tahiti, with its theme of revolution and renewal in the new land of Pitcairn's Island. On July 27, 1879, Verne bought for 300 French Francs the rights to a short story telling of the Bounty from Gabriel Marcel (1843-1909), a geographer of the National Library with whom he had collaborated with Hetzel in writing the Discovery of the Earth: History of the Great Voyagers and Great Navigators Découverte de la Terre and La Conquête géographique et économique du monde. “The Mutineers of the Bounty” (“Les révoltés de la Bounty”) subsequently appeared under the Verne by-line in Magasin d’Education et de Récréation, filling out the Hetzel volume of The Five Hundred Millions of the Begum that year (itself derived from the Grousset original), with which it would be translated into English. Sea stories, more frequently than other adventure subtypes, take up serious and complex themes. History is a frequent source (the Bounty retellings, Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast), and a number of the best-known books are respected classics (Jack London's The Sea Wolf, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Billy Budd), or novels of a higher literary standard than most adventure fiction (Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous, C.S. Forester's Hornblower series and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Marturin series). James Fenimore Cooper, whose influence Verne acknowledged, was as much in his lifetime associated with sea stories as the Leatherstocking westerns for which he is best remembered today. The plot of The Kip Brothers is given an element of unpredictability by its mix of every incident typical of sea adventure: a tavern from which sailors are drawn; shipwreck; rescue; repelling native boarders; dangerous storms; a villainous ship’s officer; mutiny; and the possibility of piracy. Sea adventures contrast the reality and mythology of the sea; the grace of wind, sails and rigging is counterpointed by the routine of ocean-going life, revealing the rugged life of the sailor. Verne carefully etches the James Cook and crew as they prepare to launch, with the best characters naturally drawn to such a ship and the healthy, natural side of the sea, with even the cabin boy, Jim, another example of the high moral standards on board. The first half of The Kip Brothers is a languorous travelogue serving to establish the locale and characters, with elegant descriptive passages. The sea story is initially differentiated from other adventure types by its manner of presentation, with a style considerably less romantic, more realistic, if not quite mimetic. This is echoed through the visual integration of many of the engravings from Discovery of the Earth: History of the Great Voyagers and Great Navigators, almost as many as originals for the incidents and characters of The Kip Brothers. Similarly, Verne’s version of the Bounty story is not only in this region, but visualized in the same manner with the five illustrations by Drée. This pattern with the engravings does not repeat in the second half of The Kip Brothers, where, by contrast, the pace accelerates, from the conspiracy of Balt and Mod against the Kips onward, concentrating largely on incident. Some of the latter half reads so fast as to be almost a summary, a 60 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) condensation of events as the book races toward its conclusion. This aspect was reflected in its writing, with the first half composed over four months, the second in a mere six weeks.[13] Given the mimetic element, the sea story is the adventure type with the least opportunity for women to participate, since their presence is unlikely in such a locale in this period, not to mention the limitations which then existed on women's roles. Accordingly, in The Kip Brothers the only female character is Mrs. Gibson, who remained home in Hobart Town during her husband’s voyages, and the even lesser Mrs. Zieger. Voyages in adventure inevitably lead to self-revelation, the baring of one's true nature. As Ishmael narrates in Moby Dick, the sea is a place "where each man, as in a mirror, finds himself." It is possible to find self-improvement in the environment of the sea, as in the reformation of Harvey Cheyne in Captains Courageous.

The Kip Brothers begins in 1885, in the wake of the depredations of gold fever in British-governed New Zealand and nearby territories. Maritime discipline has collapsed under temptation, with crews eager to desert for the elusive possibility of discovering gold. Sea adventures typically include lifetime Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation 61 sailors or men forced into service by impressment, drifters without families. They are restless from the start, grumbling against authority and tempted toward mutiny, whether provoked or not, and are revealed in only one other conventional habitat, the tavern. Verne recognizes this in opening at such a site, from which sailors are inevitably drawn and to which they return. At the “Three Magpies,” renewing acquaintances inevitably leads to brawls. Even here, Balt’s consumption of liquor marks him as a villain where the customers are all men of ill repute. (6) Sea adventures tend to become character studies of the captain, officers and crew, their leadership abilities, motivations, and relationships. The conventional plot concentrates on groups of men in isolated conditions, separated for lengthy periods from civilization. Living amidst the elements and outside normal social interaction, under pressure in close quarters, officers and sailors alike are faced with exhausting labors. The sea adventure offers a notable range of admirable captains, such as the title character of the Horatio Hornblower series, himself a fictional displacement of Admiral Horatio Nelson. These are individuals with the charisma of Ahab and the seafaring skill of William Bligh, yet refreshingly sane and human, turning their talents to the needs of the voyage. Discipline is strict but also wins the devotion of both officers and sailors. Verne’s composition of a sea story in tribute to his late brother becomes doubly comprehensible given the genre’s possibilities for a heroic portrayal of an idealized mariner. In the first half of The Kip Brothers, the James Cook has a captain to match the ship’s name. The constant repetition of the name of the ship around which so much of the action revolves serves as a reminder of one of the true heroes of naval command and exploration, whose achievements filled a nearly a third of the 18th century volume of Verne’s Discovery of the Earth: History of the Great Voyagers and Great Navigators. As captain of the James Cook, Gibson himself comes to stand in for the explorer, murdered on the then-“savage” islands, just as natives are initially suspected of taking Gibson’s life on Kerawara. This was not the first allusion to Cook in the Extraordinary Voyages. Cook, the absent hero of The Kip Brothers, is repeatedly referenced in The Mutineers of the Bounty. Captain Bligh was the lieutenant under James Cook, becoming a discrete signifier in The Kip Brothers when considering that Verne had squeezed his story into the Extraordinary Voyages. Cook is a marker by which the courage of the Kips, and the depravity of Flig Balt and Vin Mod, may be presented. One of their first thoughts in planning to take the ship is to give it a new name, Pretty Girl, not only because it would thereby be lost to searchers, but because the name James Cook is an ever-present sign of morality along the frontiers. The strength and wisdom of a command in the sea adventure are measured by the captain's own sense of fairness and mercy. The lack of such an understanding portends disaster. Often there is a heartless officer, with an uncaring attitude toward his crew, whether William Bligh, Wolf Larsen, Ahab, Claggart in Billy Budd, or Flig Balt. Obsessed, they have lost all grasp of human values; they believe their goal on the voyage justifies any act, no matter how ruthless. Such a figure may verge on madness and carries authority to an extreme, whether in the service of empire (Bligh) or on some personal mission of revenge (Larsen and Ahab) or outlawry (Balt and Mod). Gibson has made a fatal error, in relying on the good character of his bosun, accepting his judgment and recruitment of new sailors. The potential mutineers from the “Three Magpies” are repeatedly frustrated when possible opportunities are foiled by a series of coincidences that make the odds against successful mutiny too great. A truly necessary mutiny in the genre must be the only way to secure the basic human dignity of which the crew has been deprived. This is epitomized by the replacement of 62 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Bligh by Fletcher Christian, and not a new, more restrictive hierarchy, such as the one that Balt and Mod propose. Despite the derivation from Marcel, Verne’s Bounty story was no dry telling of facts and history, but a highly fictionalized account along the lines of the famous 20th century trilogy by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Like their series, Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, and Pitcairn’s Island, Verne’s three chapters follow these central strands. The opening tells of Christian seizing the ship and placing Bligh and his followers in a longboat. The second chapter describes their incredible voyage through the most perilous conditions and privations. The final chapter recounts the mutineer’s settlement of Pitcairn’s Island, not concealing how ill-suited the seamen were to the challenges of their new life. However, ameliorating this is the reprehensible treatment of the innocent men when Bligh returned to Tahiti. Balt’s lack of moral authority is echoed by his mishandling of the ship during a storm. Even as problematic a captain as Bligh had a redeeming quality, the seamanship that steered his followers through a 3,600 mile journey in treacherous seas to port. When Hawkins replaces Balt with Karl Kip as captain, he stands out as the individual who has Gibson’s virtues, righteousness and skill, and so is fit to take the helm of the James Cook. Kip, in effect, not only replaces Gibson as captain, but inherits his mantle as stand-in for Cook, and the Kip brothers will suffer a fate almost as savage as that which their predecessors met, save that they survive. In both The Mutineers of the Bounty (its first chapter), and The Kip Brothers (197-198), the story is less about the mutiny itself than its lingering aftermath. Whereas the former mutiny was necessary, and in The Kip Brothers a crime, the Fenians are in a position similar to Christian’s followers. Like the mutineers, the Fenians must escape in order to find safety in their struggle for freedom and independence. No less than the refugees settling Pitcairn, the Fenians must flee Old World values and social barriers, transcending them in exile in the United States. For all these reasons, I would suggest that The Kip Brothers needs to be seen within the context of the sea adventure, and that not only may it reflect on the cases of Dreyfus and the Roriques–and that of Grousset as well–but that this generic structure is ideal for relating such a narrative. Questions of justice and abuse of authority, so much a part of the unjust imprisonment in The Kip Brothers, are central to the sea adventure. Verne had already included the Bounty story in the Extraordinary Voyages and The Kip Brothers resembles it just as it does the more contemporary real-life examples. The author’s selection of genre, and how its formula serves his purposes in telling a story, is central to understanding the many threads that form the tapestry of The Kip Brothers.

NOTES

1. An analysis of this plot device within the contemporary beliefs of the time is offered in Arthur B. Evans, “Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man’s Eye,” Science-fiction Studies, 20 (November 1993), 341-361. 2. Jean-Michel Margot, “Notes” in Jules Verne, The Kip Brothers (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 428-429. Subsequent references to quotations will be from this edition, as translated by Stanford L. Luce. Opening the Sources of The Kip Brothers: A Generic Interpretation 63

3. The fraternal relationship in “The Fate of Jean Morenas” was the addition of Michel Verne to his father’s original story. 4. Russell Freedman, Jules Verne: Portrait of a Prophet (New York: Holiday House, 1965), 231. 5. G.A. Raper, “The Story of the Brothers Degrave,” The Wide World Magazine, 7 (June 1901), 211- 212. 6. While Jules Verne had several collaborators as a playwright, outside of his own son, Michel, Grousset was the only individual with whom he coauthored novels. 7. Fluent in English, he was often engaged in translations and also wrote a series of pioneering science fiction novels. These included such topics as interplanetary travel and undersea exploration in The Conquest of the Moon (1889), New York to Brest in Seven Hours (1890), The Crystal City Under the Sea (1896), and The Secret of the Magian; or, the Mystery of Ecbatana (1897). Like Verne, Grousset also wrote adventure. 8. Hayden W. Ward, "The Pleasure of Your Heart: Treasure Island and the Appeal of Boys' Adventure Fiction," Studies in the Novel, 6 91978), 314; Robert Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), 154-155; Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 23. See also William Bolitho, Twelve against the Gods: The Story of Adventure (New York: Readers Club, 1941), 238-9, 214-215; Lowell Thomas, ed., Great True Adventures (New York: Hawthorne, 1955), xi; Georg Simmel, "The Adventure," trans. David Kettler, in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 243; Michael Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousnes, 1100-1750, trans. Ruth Crowley (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3, 373. For more background on adventure and its definition, see Brian Taves, The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993). 9. Paul Zweig, The Adventurer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 12. 10. Verne's twenty-nine adventure novels include, chronologically, The Count of Chanteleine: Episode of the Revolution, The Children of Captain Grant, A Floating City, The Blockade Runners, Adventures of Three Russians and Three Englishmen in Southern Africa, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Fur Country, Uncle Robinson, The Chancellor, Michael Strogoff, A Fifteen Year Old Captain, The Jangada, The Archipelago on Fire, A Lottery Ticket, North Against South, The Road to France, Two Year Holiday, Family Without a Name, Caesar Cascabel, Mistress Branican, Claudius Bombarnac, Wonderful Adventures of Master Antifer, The Mighty Orinoco, Second Fatherland, The Kip Brothers, Scholarships for Travel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, The Golden Volcano, and The Survivors of the Jonathan. 11. Susanne Howe, Novels of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 64-68. 12. By 1880, Verne stories were mainstays of Boy’s Own Paper in England, promulgating the values of hero-worship, militarism, nationalism, and imperialism to youth. As with publication of Verne in the Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, serving as a staple in a periodical was at least as important commercially in the 19th century context as actual book sales. American publishers came to rely more and more on utilizing translations already commissioned for Boy’s Own Paper, rather than their own. In turn, British publishers were fearful of Verne stories that might offend Boy’s Own Paper readers in the empire, and so the anticipated taste of this market came to govern what appeared in English translations on either side of the Atlantic. Although one or more Verne titles continued to be published annually in France until 1910, after 1898 only two of these books, The Will of an Eccentric and The Chase of the Golden Meteor, appeared simultaneously in England. Commercial factors were not decisive; while sales in France of the late Verne works declined in the 1890s, they remained profitable in England and the United States, as indicated by the steady issuing 64 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

of new editions of even such minor novels as Claudius Bombarnac. Even after World War I, to the late 1920s, Sampson Low continued to reprint of many of the lesser known Verne works. Political questions became the deciding factor in whether the latest Verne books appeared in English at all. Their tenor was less agreeable to English-speaking audiences, or at least publishers who were not prepared to faithfully present Verne's views. The censorship grew beyond simply changing or removing controversial passages, to avoiding novels where contentious subject matter was embedded. 13. Jean-Michel Margot, “Introduction” in Jules Verne, The Kip Brothers (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), x. REVIEWS

Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1882) en néerlandais

Dave Bonte

Rien de mieux pour résumer le Voyage à travers l’impossible que les mots employés par Jean- Michel Margot dans sa préface de la réédition française du texte en 2005 : “Pièce maîtresse de Jules Verne, Voyage à travers l’impossible, est un joyau inattendu, surprenant et paradoxal au sein d’une œuvre immense, parfois trop connue et souvent déroutante.”[1]

“Surprenant” et “paradoxal”, c’est effectivement le moins que l’on puisse dire. Rompant avec les critères de vraisemblance que lui imposait Hetzel, Jules Verne laisse libre cours à son imagination dans cette pièce de théâtre où l’on franchit les limites du possible. En effet, en compagnie du héros Georges Hatteras (fils du célèbre capitaine) et d’un grand nombre de personnages verniens, le lecteur passe prestement du centre de la terre au fabuleux Atlantis, pour enfin atterrir sur la planète Altor, hors de notre système solaire. Les héros réussissent donc à réaliser des projets “impossibles”; chose à laquelle on n’est point habitué dans les Voyages Extraordinaires. Bref, on retrouve ici un des rares textes de vraie science-fiction (voire de fantasy) de celui qu’on continue encore trop souvent à considérer comme le père-fondateur du genre. Le manuscrit du Voyage à travers l’impossible, écrit en 1882, fut longtemps considéré comme étant perdu. Introuvable parmi les documents de Verne et de sa famille, c’est seulement en 1979 que la pièce fut retrouvée là où elle se trouvait depuis de nombreuses années : aux Archives de la Censure de la Troisième République où une copie de chaque pièce de théâtre devait être déposée avant sa représentation. La première édition du Voyage fut publiée chez Pauvert [2] en 1981 par François Raymond et Robert Pourvoyeur. Il fallait ensuite attendre le début des années 2000 pour la première traduction (en anglais[3]), une réédition française aux Editions L’Atalante et quelques rares représentations de la pièce[4] (les premières depuis 1883 !). Pourtant, depuis mai 2007 un nouvel épisode est venu s’ajouter au destin des aventures de l’intrépide Georges Hatteras. Après l’édition anglaise, une deuxième traduction a vu le jour, cette fois- ci en néerlandais.[5] La “Jules Verne Genootschap”[6] en est responsable avec un texte publié chez Lulu, maison d’autoédition qui permet un tirage limité. Il s’agit d’un format “poche” et, tout comme la version française chez L’Atalante et l’édition anglaise, la publication contient le texte dans son intégralité, ce qui n’était pas encore le cas pour la première édition chez Pauvert où manquait la scène unique du tableau 7. D’ailleurs, avec cette nouvelle traduction la boucle semble bouclée, car c’est l’éminent professeur Robert Pourvoyeur qui, comme pour la première édition française en 1981, a écrit une introduction dans laquelle il souligne encore une fois la position particulière qu’occupe le Voyage à travers l’impossible au sein du corpus vernien.

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Espérons néanmoins que la boucle ne sera que provisoirement bouclée et que d’autres traductions s’ajouteront à la liste encore trop limitée d’éditions en langue étrangère de cette pièce déconcertante !

Détails de la nouvelle traduction : Verne Jules en d’Ennery Adolphe, De reis door het onmogelijke, Lulu, 2007. ISBN: 978-90-9021899-1 (http://www.lulu.nl/content/830081)

NOTES

1. Verne, Jules. Voyage à travers l’impossible, Ed. présentée par Agnès Marcetteau-Paul et Jean-Michel Margot, Nantes, Librairie L’Atalante, 2005, p. 9. 2. Verne, Jules. Voyage à travers l’impossible, Paris, Pauvert, 1981. 3. Verne, Jules. Journey through the Impossible, New York, Prometheus Books, 2003. 4. Pensons notamment à la mise en scène moderne de Geneviève Brunet-Smith, jouée en mars 2005 au théâtre français Histrio à Washington. 5. Verne, Jules. De reis door het onmogelijke, Lulu, 2007. 6. La “Société Jules Verne” des Pays-Bas. La traduction et la publication ont été réalisées par son membre Dave Bonte.

LITTÉRATURE

Pourvoyeur, Robert. Du nouveau… sur l’impossible, Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne, vol. 12, n° 45, p. 137-151, janvier-mars 1978. ______, Een vreemde eend in de bijt, in: Guis Luijters, In de ban van Jules Verne, Soesterberg, Uitgeverij Aspekt, p. 136-144, 2005. Verne, Jules. De reis door het onmogelijke, Lulu, 2007. ______. Journey through the Impossible, New York, Prometheus Books, 2003. ______. Voyage à travers l’impossible, Paris, Pauvert, 1981. ______. Voyage à travers l’impossible, Ed. présentée par Agnès Marcetteau-Paul et Jean-Michel Margot, Nantes, Librairie L’Atalante, 2005. 67 68 Verniana, Volume 1 (2008-2009) Index of Authors and Editorial Board Members

Index des auteurs et membres du Comité de rédaction

Dave Bonte ([email protected]) est membre du conseil d’administration de la Société Jules Verne des Pays-Bas et rédacteur en chef de Verniaan, la revue officielle de cette même société. Ces dernières années il a, entre autre, traduit Voyage d’études et la pièce de théâtre Voyage à travers l’impossible. Amateur de Jules Verne, il est aussi un fervent lecteur de science fiction et s’intéresse particulièrement à l’utopie. Actuellement, il travaille comme enseignant de français et d’italien dans une école de langues en Flandre-Orientale (Belgique). William Butcher ([email protected]): Hongkonger Dr William Butcher has lectured at the École Nationale d’Administration and researched at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Oxford. He has been researching Verne since 1976 (the full text of his 40 articles and most of his 10 books since 1980 appears on http://home.netvigator.com/~wbutcher/). Author of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self: Space and Time in the “Voyages extraordinaires” (Macmillan 1990) and Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography (2006, 2nd illustrated edn 2008), he has published translations and annotated editions for OUP of Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1992), Around the World in Eighty Days (1995), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1998) and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (2007). As well as critical editions of Backwards to Britain (Chambers 1992), The Mysterious Island (Wesleyan UP 2005) and Salon de 1857 (Acadien 2008), he has published translations and editions of Humbug (Acadian 1992 and 2008) and Lighthouse at the End of the World (Nebraska UP 2006). He is currently working on three volumes in French. Daniel Compère ([email protected]) est professeur de littérature française à l’Université de Paris III-Sorbonne nouvelle. Créateur du Centre Jules Verne d’Amiens en 1972, il a publié de nombreux ouvrages et articles sur Jules Verne (dont Les Voyages extraordinaires de Jules Verne. Pocket, 2005). Président de l’Association des Amis du Roman populaire et responsable de la revue Le Rocambole, il a également consacré des publications à la littérature populaire dont deux livres sur Alexandre Dumas (dont D’Artagnan & Cie. Les Belles Lettres - Encrage, 2002). Récemment, il a dirigé un Dictionnaire du roman populaire francophone (Editions Nouveau Monde, 2007). Volker Dehs ([email protected]), né en 1964 à Bremen (Allemagne) se voue depuis 25 ans à la recherche biographique et à l’établissement de la bibliographie vernienne. Éditeur de plusieurs textes ignorés de Jules Verne, il est collaborateur (avec Olivier Dumas et Piero Gondolo della Riva) de la Correspondance de Jules et Michel Verne avec leurs éditeurs Hetzel (Slatkine, 5 vols, 1999 à 2006). Il a traduit plusieurs romans en allemand et en a établi des éditions critiques. Ses textes sur Jules Verne ont été publiés en francais, allemand, anglais, espagnol, portugais, polonais et en japonais.

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Arthur B. Evans ([email protected]) is Professor of French at DePauw University and managing editor of the scholarly journal Science Fiction Studies. He has published numerous books and articles on Verne and early French science fiction, including the award-winning Jules Verne Rediscovered (Greenwood, 1988). He is the general editor of Wesleyan University Press’s “Early Classics of Science Fiction” series. Terry A. Harpold ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of English, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Florida (USA), and the author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). His previous essays on Jules Verne have appeared in Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne, IRIS, Revue Jules Verne, and Science Fiction Studies. Jean-Michel Margot ([email protected]) is an internationally recognized specialist on Jules Verne. He currently serves as president of the North American Jules Verne Society (NAJVS, Inc.) and has published several books and many articles on Verne and his work. His most recent include a study of Verne’s theatrical play Journey Through the Impossible (Prometheus, 2003), a volume of the nineteenth-century Verne criticism title Jules Verne en son temps (Encrage, 2004) and the introduction and notes of Verne’s The Kip Brothers (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Walter James Miller ([email protected]), television and radio writer, critic, poet, and translator, is generally regarded as one of the leading Verne scholars. His more than sixty books include The Annotated Jules Verne (a Book-of-the-Month selection), Engineers as Writers, Making an Angel: Poems; critical commentaries on Vonnegut, Heller, Doctorow, Beckett, critical editions of Homer, Shakespeare, Conrad, Dickens, and Dumas. His articles, poems, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, New York Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Literary Review, Explicator, College English, Authors Guild Bulletin, Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review, Engineer, Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech, Civil Engineering, and many other periodicals and anthologies. From the Literary Review he has won its Charles Angoff Award for Excellence in Poetry; from the Armed Forces Service League, a prize for military fiction; and from the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, a special award for his NBC-TV series, Master Builders of America. A veteran of World War II, he has taught at Hofstra University, the Polytechnic University, Colorado State University, and is now Professor of English at New York University. Brian Taves ([email protected]) has a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California) has been an archivist with the Motion Picture/Broadcast/Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress since 1990. He is the author of over 100 articles, 20 chapters in anthologies, in addition to books on P.G. Wodehouse and Hollywood; on fantasy-adventure writer Talbot Mundy, in addition to editing an original anthology of Mundy’s best stories never before published in book form; on the genre of historical adventure movies; and on director Robert Florey. In 2002-2003, Taves was chosen as Kluge Staff Fellow at the Library to write the first book on silent film pioneer Thomas Ince, which is nearing completion. Taves’s writing on Verne has been translated into French, German, and Spanish. He is Vice President of the North American Jules Verne Society, coauthor of The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, and is writing a book on the 300 film and television adaptations of Verne worldwide. Ian Thompson ([email protected]) graduated in Geography from Durham University (UK) in 1957 and completed a Masters degree at Indiana University in 1958 and a PhD from Durham in 1960. Subsequently he taught at Leeds and Southampton Universities and was an Associate Professor at Miami University Ohio before becoming Professor of Geography at Glasgow Index of Authors and Editorial Board Members 71

University, Scotland in 1976. He is presently Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University. His research interest has been in the economic and social geography of France and North Africa and has written, edited and translated numerous books on this area. He was made an honorary Life Fellow of La Société de Géographie de Paris and in 2007 was promoted to Commandeur dans l’Ordre National des Palmes Académiques by the French Government. He was for many years President of the Alliance Française de Glasgow. Since retirement he has researched Verne’s Scottish connection and published numerous articles on this subject. Philippe Valetoux ([email protected]). Né à Paris le 24/02/1954, Philippe Valetoux est Capitaine dans la Marine Marchande et actuellement pilote maritime au Havre. Passionné d’histoire maritime, il participe à la restauration de Marie-Fernand, cotre pilote du Havre de 1894 qui est classé “Monument Historique”. Spécialiste de l’histoire du pilotage et de la plaisance havraise, il collabore à de nombreuses revues maritimes. A partir de 1994, ses recherches sur les chantiers navals du Havre l’amènent à travailler sur les bateaux de Jules Verne et il met à jour des éléments méconnus qu’il publie dans le numéro 58 de la revue du “Centre Havrais de Recherche Historique”. Il poursuit ses travaux et publie en avril 1999 un article sur Paul Verne dans la revue Jeune Marine (n° 141), un autre dans Cols bleus (n° 2507 du 20 novembre 1999). Il rédige pour la revue Le Chasse-Marée plusieurs articles, dont “Les yachts de Jules Verne” dans le n° 140 de janvier 2001. Il participe en novembre 2003 au numéro spécial de la revue GEO: “Jules Verne, l’odyssée de la terre”. Il donne des conférences pour divers organismes, dont l’Alliance Française au Mexique en automne 2004. Par la suite, il est sollicité par le Musée de la Marine de Paris pour écrire un chapitre du catalogue de l’exposition Jules Verne et la mer. En octobre 2005, il réalise la synthèse de ses travaux verniens et édite chez Magellan un livre intitulé Jules Verne: en mer, et contre tous !, qui est sélectionné pour le Prix “Salon Nautique / Le Point 2006”. Il est aussi associé au projet de reconstruction du cotre Saint-Michel II en cours à Nantes. Il poursuit depuis de nombreuses années, en collaboration avec la Bibliothèque Municipale d’Amiens, la transcription des carnets de bord, écrits par Jules Verne sur ses yachts, et qu’il espère voir publiée prochainement. Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd ([email protected]) is a physicist at the University of Gent. He has read and collected the works of Jules Verne since the age of eleven. He has been an active member of the Dutch Jules Verne Society since its beginning, as webmaster, as assistent editor of the magazine Verniaan, and as president of the Society. He has translated various Verne texts into Dutch, among others Les méridiens et le calendrier and Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse.